In the pause, she smacked her lips. It interrupted the non-physical being.

Nerida asked, ‘I’m sorry, were you going to say something?’

‘I was going to ask you something.’ Bartgrinn inclined the head, a thoughtful energy radiating from Mari’s body.

‘Yes,’ she replied, bracing herself for tenderness.

‘We can feel you have some heavy things on your mind,’ he said, his tone low and steady. ‘Not in the sense of weight.’

‘Yes, I’m grieving,’ Nerida admitted, her voice barely above a whisper.

‘Yes, we can sense that.’

Nerida looked down at her hands. ‘It’s a peculiar thing, grief.’ It came in waves. Or hiccups. Grief made her stumble around, forget things. It launched out full blown of a thought, a comment. At work, on television. From a flower that bloomed. Or a look from Mari.

‘Yes. And until it hits you directly you can’t really understand,’ Bartgrinn said, with the sound of experience behind the words.

‘This is something that is different for everyone. And you’ll only know about your particular way of grief once you experience it yourself.

‘Even if you’ve had that experience, grief is different every time. It depends on the connection you had to that person, or that close animal, even.’

‘Because you bring different experiences to it every time and—’ Nerida began.

‘You have different memories,’ Bartgrinn gently finished for her.

‘Yeah,’ Nerida murmured.

‘Yes. If you have mainly good memories, grief can be harder because you need to let go of good feelings and memories.

‘They will still be there, but it won’t be the same. You can’t go and say, “Oh, do you remember what we did back then? In the boat on the lake, in the moonlight?” Nothing like that.’

‘Yeah,’ she said again, quietly.

‘One single aspect of grief is the mourning of a loss. The loss of good memories. You can’t make more good memories, as you would have done otherwise … If you have bad memories, grief is a lot shorter. The process is shorter because it can be almost like a relief. “Finally, we can stop now making bad memories, having bad experiences.”

She understood. Thought with compassion of those who felt that way when someone died.

Bartgrinn continued, ‘This is why it’s different for everyone. It depends on the connection.

‘You know, someone might have an animal and say, “Oh, it was such a lovely creature. Always there for me. And those eyes, I will never forget how those eyes looked at me. They made me feel happy.” And some other person might say, “Oh, that rabid little thing. I would have put it down if it hadn’t decided to leave by itself. I just could not handle it anymore.’”

His tone changed, the voice became almost reverent. ‘We can sense you lost a producer of good memories, let’s put it that way.’

‘Yes,’ Nerida said simply, her throat tight.

‘And this grieving process, it might be interesting for you in your situation and the environment you’re in. It is different not only between people. Animals grieve too. And it’s very different every time it happens.’

‘Right. It’s unpredictable,’ she said with a weary breath.

‘Yes. There is no universal answer, what to do, with grief. You might want to tell people, yes, that it is different for each person, each time.

‘It’s like, you have a plant in the garden that gives you beautiful tomatoes, or wonderful rhubarb. And then it stops. This is another kind of grief.’

That resonated with her. The one who’d left communed daily with Nature. He was a joyous gardener.

’But you can use this thought: you lost someone that produced, at least towards you, a human that gave you, produced for you, good memories.

‘The loss was not the same for everybody. They all lost the same human, but they all look back on different memories. You understand?’

‘Yes, I do. It’s complicated,’ Nerida said, rubbing the bridge of her mouth and chin.

‘So, you lost the wonderful tomato plant, my dear,” Bartgrinn added gently. Then, added, ‘I did put that in a very basic way.’

‘He wouldn’t mind that,’ Nerida said with a half-smile.

‘I think he was more of a citrus person,’ Bartgrinn reflected, seeming to tune in.

‘Okay, he did have some nice citrus in his yard, it’s true, flourishing.’ She pictured the lemon tree in his yard and it made her sadder somehow, that it flourished while his body was gone.

‘I’m not sure he would be happy with the tomato,’ Bartgrinn said with a dry chuckle.

‘I was happy with the tomato. I got one tomato.’ Her tomato plants, in pots near the back door, produced only one large, split fruit that summer, a miracle of neglect. She sent him photos of flowers in her garden when he was so suddenly sick in hospital.

‘We just got this, “And you thought it was funny? The tomato?”’

‘I thought it was delightful to have a tomato,’ she said, grinning now.

‘He’s kind of smiling, like “Calling me a tomato planting, thinking it was funny!” He’s okay with the plants, but the citrus would have been the better choice.

‘Okay, we apologise.’

Nerida smiled fondly. She wasn’t sure she’d heard any of the Beings apologise before.

‘He said, “Accepted.’”

‘It’s nice to know that he’s come, that he’s nearby,’ she said, her voice brimming with feeling.

Bartgrinn said lightly, ‘Yes, he is. He should be in contemplation. Yeah, but he comes and goes. It’s a bit like, “I have got all the time in the world. Because we don’t have time over here.’” He chuckled. Nerida laughed softly in return.

‘So, he comes and goes between. “Oh, it’s not running away from me, contemplation,” he says. “It’ll just sit there till I’m back.’’’

‘Wonderful. Wonderful,’ she whispered, touched. It was a blessing, healing, to feel her playful brother’s energy.

What to do with grief

The Bloody Weather