Remembrance can be abstract and literal at the same time. Abstract because a mere fragment can set off a deep grief pin-pointing to the sharp sensation of loss. Literal such as seeing a photo or coming across a pair of their socks.

Cemeteries are very literal places for remembrance.

Before Rob passed away, apart from grandparents who had reached the natural end of their lives, no one close to me had died.

Looking back on it, I was lucky. I know people who have prematurely lost parents, nieces, nephews, best friends, and it shaped the rest of their lives.

When I was in New Zealand just after Rob died, we visited the cemetery to pick a plot. What I wasn’t prepared for was this huge expanse of greenery, the sense of calm.

We buried him in a plot in full view of the sun, and the edge dips into a valley of water where yachts bob in the distance.

Although I have talked to him constantly since he passed, whispered into the line where the sea meets the shore, talked out loud across moors, along rivers, by duck ponds, spoken into the megaphone of clouds funnelling above my head, this is the anchor and root of where he is.

I have longed for this place, yearned to sit beside him, but I am also terrified of what it may unplug emotionally. Will I start wailing and lose control?

The first time I visit the cemetery after he was buried nine months before, I take Prue with me. She gives me time alone to sit by him. And I cry. Not huge gulps, but I cry a little bit. I place my hand on the ground and try to reach out to his body lying far down below.

It seems wrong there is sunshine. That the grass has grown. That cicadas – the sound of summer in my ears – are humming while he will never speak again.

The importance of a grave, I realise in that moment, is it winches you back to reality when your mind tries to tell you this could not possibly have happened. That this man, whose hands once held your waist, whose lips kissed your own, who was the greatest love of your life, is now lying below your feet. Nature knows this to be true because grass has started to grow over him like a blanket.

But he is not asleep, he is gone. There is an expectation to feel him there, to feel something tangible and filled with comfort, and the absence of that is cold and empty.

When I return to the cemetery alone, a few days later, it is completely different. John Denver comes on the radio, ‘Rocky Mountain High’, a song Rob loved. It’s warm and in the distance I can hear ‘Amazing Grace’ being played on bagpipes at a funeral nearby.

I realise Rob isn’t his body; he is the songs he loved, the plants he photographed and the letters he wrote to all of us. And rather than an absence at his grave, I feel Rob pouring in.

I took vows, and while his life was not mine, it was half of mine and I promised to be there for him in sickness and in health.

I’m sorry, I whisper.

I say it like a rosary prayer, over and over.

I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Bobbie, I’m so sorry.

I ask him for forgiveness. I tell him how much I miss him, the smell of his hair, the sound of his voice.

As I sit in this swell of new grief, I think about how all of those people will feel when they see the coffin being lowered into the earth. How it will stay chiselled into their memories for years to come, each second of that moment hammered in stone, blood and pain.