Still Got It

Chapter Twenty-Two

I t was just an ordinary Monday. Grace repeated that to herself over and over again. She couldn’t let the fact that it was three years to the day since Phil had died overwhelm her. She refused to say she’d ‘lost’ Phil or that he’d ‘passed’. They were such silly words to use. She hadn’t ‘lost’ him– that sounded like he’d been mislaid in an aisle in Sainsbury’s– and ‘passed’ always made her think of exams. One old neighbour had rung her the week after Phil’s death to say she’d only just heard that Phil had ‘passed’. Grace had had to summon up every ounce of her strength not to say, ‘Yes, thankfully I don’t have to drive him around anymore.’

It was up to other people how they described what had happened to their loved ones, but she just preferred to go straight in with ‘died’. There was a lot of considering other people’s feelings after a death, far more than she’d thought, and there’d been days when she’d been too exhausted to cope with anyone else’s grief as well as her own. Her daughters or Sofia had gently turned people away from the door, saying that she was resting, which was a joke in itself. There’d been precious little rest in those first few weeks.

A vision of Phil’s emaciated body in his raised bed at the hospice caused her to let out a tiny cry. This was no good. She had a lesson in twenty minutes, with Stelios’s parents, the restaurant owners. Grace forced herself to think happy thoughts. She hadn’t wanted to take the day off, or draw attention to the date, which held no significance for anyone else on the island. She hadn’t even told Angeliki, although they were meeting for coffee later.