In the days following my brother’s death, there was nothing to do, and everything to do. Our normal lives had been put on hold while we negotiated that strange, liminal zone between the vaporous shock of the news, and the more solid event of the funeral. Really, though, our old lives had been obliterated. What you don’t perhaps at first realise, is that the death of a family member, or someone similarly close, means a form of death also for the one left behind. Old identities, patterns of living, habits of thought, securities, all become dust. Grievers must suddenly assume the shoes of emotional-construction workers, forced to forge new lives from the ruins of the old.