My husband left his medication at home, so I stopped by his office to bring it to him. But when I asked the receptionist to call him downstairs, she said, "Ma'am, your husband has been on leave for the past week."

And she is right that he is right.

That is the part of this that has taken me eleven weeks to be able to look at, and it is the reason I am writing any of it down at all.

Our father went four years ago.

Gordon. Seventy-one years old. He was a quantity surveyor for forty-one years and he could not sit through a film.

He was ill for about fourteen months at the end of it.

Four of those were fine. The other ten were not.

And for the last six weeks of it, I stopped going.

I did not announce it. I did not decide it. There was never a day where I sat down and chose.

I went from four times a week, to twice, to once.

To a Sunday. To not that Sunday, because of a thing at work that I could have moved.

And then it had been eleven days. And then it had been three weeks. And by then there was a sort of wall in front of that car park that I could not get through.