Growing older means watching people become memories while your calendar continues functioning normally.

The strangest part of loss is how ordinary everything else remains. People become memories and the emails still arrive, the appointments still need keeping, the world requires you to function on a schedule that takes no account of what has happened. That gap between the size of the loss and the indifference of the calendar is one of the harder things to bear.

Give yourself specific room for the person rather than expecting grief to fit around your obligations. A date, a walk, a conversation with someone who also knew them. And be gentle about how long it takes; there is no schedule for this, whatever your week suggests.