Grief takes you down paths you didn’t know existed within yourself. It leads you to places in your own interior landscape that you have never visited, depths of love you didn’t know you were capable of, depths of pain that surprise you even after all this time, corners of yourself that only open in the dark.

Sometimes those paths are frightening. Sometimes they’re strangely beautiful. Sometimes they’re both at once.

I’ve learnt to zigzag my way downhill, taking the pressure off, finding a different angle on the same slope. It takes longer. It’s less direct. But it gets me down in one piece. And in my way. Grief is exactly like that. There are days I brace myself for, the days that are marked in the calendar as ‘harder days’. I prepare. I give myself permission in advance to fall apart. And sometimes I do, often in private. But sometimes those days arrive and I find I can breathe through them, because I was ready, because I had armoured up, because the anticipation held me together.