I would not mind going mad. It would absolve me of any need to go on coping, which is a particular kind of living hell. The simplicity of letting go, of shuffling about in a Valium- induced haze, is alluring. I lack the kind of ruthless ability that Victoria had to bring about a complete physical destruction of the entire human package. It is my fate to keep waking and find myself alive.

We want to feel the pain of her loss, because at least it is something of her to feel. However, the result is that we don’t sleep. The nearest thing to sleep that I experience is blacking out, from which I emerge instantly awake, twitchy and unrefreshed. And always, I wake with the knowledge that she is dead. There are no vestiges of dreams where she is alive. I don’t seem to dream at all.

I try to be the rock that I see they hope I can be. People can take only so much distress and hair-tearing. They need to be given to, as well as to give. What they want from me is hope, that I can carry on, that everything will sort of be all right.

Malcolm’s friend, Ishak, tells him to be strong. Be strong—it is also a saying used by New Zealand Maori who will urge, kia kaha. My husband repeats to himself, Be strong, as if trying it on for size. Yet he is finding it impossible to be strong. He realises that Ishak’s advice is that of a believer, one who sees a point to all this suffering. A superior being has willed it, and there is life after death. Malcolm admires that certainty, that belief. But he does not share it.

Amid this constant physical presence of fellow human beings, we gaze inward, trying to absorb what has happened with our lives and why the person we love the most is not here.

My dad—Victoria’s grandfather, “Poppa Jim”, as she called him—is forever waist-deep in the warm water of the harbour, holding a body.