When did you begin to see the unexpected gifts that came with your loss?

The next year of university was a struggle and I didn’t think that losing her had taught me anything. It hadn’t yet, because her death didn’t come with instant knowledge; I only knew that it was the most devastating event of my life. Its lessons came slowly and gradually, through experience. The most important was an acute awareness of my mortality. The understanding that no one’s going to find a good life for you, you have to find it for yourself. You have to live it to the best of your ability, to the best of your knowledge. It’s finite. And it can either be full of your joy, or there can be no joy at all – that’s up to you.

That awareness was different from thinking you can die at any time in an anxious way; I never felt that. It’s true, you can die at any time, but I’ve never felt my life was in immediate danger, just that it was always in danger, so I had better get on with living it. That attitude meant I refused to take a boring job, or make a decision I really didn’t want to, just because it might give me enough money to do something interesting in the future. I had no time for deferred gratification. That wasted time in the present suddenly seemed too harsh a payment. It wasn’t about thinking ‘live fast, die young’, it was more that I knew what I wanted – to be happy, fulfilled and free – and I wasn’t willing to do things that weren’t in pursuit of that. I became ambitious on my own terms. Obviously we all have to do things that we don’t want to, but the notion that you should take a job you hate because it will make your life better years from now? It no longer made sense to me.