Iris Murdoch once said that ‘love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.’ She’s right – we achieve love by overcoming our narcissism. When, as teens, we begin having relationships, we tend to do so from within our own point of view; we experience our own feelings as authentic, while the feelings of the beloved have little reality. The capacity to love – the opposite of narcissism – is the capacity to see other people, their lives and feelings, as real; the capacity to love is the ability to separate this more objective picture of the beloved from the picture that is produced by our fears and desires.

Recently, a patient of mine described to me how, in the middle of an argument with his wife, he had the thought: good Lord, she’s awful! But this thought was followed by the idea: wait a minute, I’m pretty awful too – I’m being horrid to her. She really has to put up with a lot from me. This moment of realization was an instance of him tolerating his ambivalence – and accepting her ambivalent feelings towards him – seeing her point of view. We have to hear, see, feel the beloved’s reality. I think if we can endure these moments of ambivalence, hear what matters to the other person, we can begin to move towards a more loving relationship.

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.

It never left me. It is in the small things – like the decision to order the lobster – and the big things – like leaving my job as a columnist at the Guardian after twenty-six years to become an academic. That was entirely informed by that lesson. I thought, I don’t want to die doing this, I want to die somewhere else. People still ask why I left, and my answer to them would be: well, if I don’t want to do it, it doesn’t make sense to waste any remaining years of my life on it, does it? That attitude has worked out well for me, an unlikely class-shifting dude who went from the working class into the middle class. I would often say to myself, ‘What’s the worst thing that can happen?’ I said it so many times until I no longer needed to. Because the worst thing that could happen to me already had – my mum had died – and so that left me with a calculated sense of fearlessness. It gave me a yardstick I would use to make decisions. A lot of the time when you are making a decision you know what the answer is, you just need the courage to follow through on what you already know to be right. My mum gave me that courage, in both her life and her death.

How did that early loss change the way you approached love and relationships?

I think sometimes you look for the parts of yourself you’ve lost in a relationship. I was twenty-three when my father died, and it was almost impossible for me to think about anything else. I would wake up in the night screaming. Then when I went back to work, I started flirting with a guy in another office cubicle over GChat. At the time I had a boyfriend of seven years, who I had neglected in the wake of my father’s death. Although nothing happened with the guy at work, the excitement and newness of that was an escape.

At first I was in so much pain that I wanted to keep someone around, a human body I could count on. But eventually, that little crush at work made me think, I don’t want to do this any more, and I broke up with my boyfriend. Being interested in someone new made me realize how fake the other relationship was. It saved me, in a way. In the wake of tragedy, sometimes desire is a bomb that can’t be denied. Fresh loss is like defogging your eyeglasses.