I love this photo of Michael, taken by Claire Macnamee outside Lumb Bank, the Arvon Foundation’s Yorkshire writing centre. Apart from his beauty, I think it also shows his kindness, intelligence, warmth and sparkle (no mean feat as he most likely had a hangover from the previous night!)

Tuesday 16th September 2014, was ten years since his death, and there have been some lovely tributes to him, notably one from Katy Evans-Bush, a former student and friend who blogs about literature at Baroque in Hackney

So I won’t add to the memorialising here, but consider instead what it is like when someone you love has been dead for a whole decade. That’s almost a fifth of my life, and over half of our son’s. Despite that, and the knowledge that we have not just survived, but changed and grown over that time, there is still a big part of me that refuses to believe or accept that he is gone from our lives. Just looking at the photo of his smiling face, I still wonder – ‘But where is he?’ No matter what else is happening in life, he is never really out of my mind for long, and I can’t see that changing.

The mistake we make with grieving is to think that our memories of people will fade with time, recede into the past to be replaced by the more vivid experience of the present. In fact, I think the opposite happens – it seems like the longer it is since someone died, the more they are missed, the more their loss resonates with those of us who knew them. Maybe it’s that we now have the responsibility for keeping them alive in our heads – and also, as it were, keeping them up to date, since a person is almost frozen in time at the age of their death. I think about what Michael would have made of Facebook, for example, which didn’t exist at the time he died  – he’d surely have had a million ‘friends’. More poignantly, how would he have felt about seeing his little son grown up into a young man? And how would his continuing existence have made a difference in Ruairi’s life? All these questions are of course unanswerable, and by that very fact continue to be asked.

People we have loved or were related to are bound up with our selves like the fibres of a thick rope which can’t be unwoven. They are part of who we are, and our relationship with them continues developing – whether or not you believe that the dead live on in some other realm, or simply inside the heads and hearts of those who knew them in life, I don’t think matters.