Why this book exists
A focused place to understand what is happening
Gwen can tell you what she was doing. She was putting the washing on, and the machine was already running when the doorbell went, and she remembers being mildly irritated because she had to walk through wet floor to answer it. There were two police officers. That was fourteen months ago. Her husband had been dead for perhaps ninety minutes at that point, in a collision on a road he drove every day, and she had spent those ninety minutes putting on a wash and thinking about what to make for dinner. She returns to this a great deal: that there was a period in which he was dead and she did not know, and that the last thing she said to him was about a parcel. This book is about deaths like that. Deaths without warning: road collisions, accidents, sudden.
The writing is designed to reduce shame, bring the underlying pattern into view and give you practical ways to respond without pretending that every life follows the same formula.
