Before my 19-year-old son di3d, he donated his heart to an 18-year-old girl — after the transplant, her mother handed me a letter from my son that began, “Mom, there’s something you need to know about her.”

I did not accept it.

I sold the car. I sold my mother’s gold — everything she left me, rings, two bracelets, a chain I had never worn — in a shop on Bridge Street for eleven hundred pounds. I spent almost everything on second opinions and a clinic in another country and a man who turned out to be a fraud and whose name I am not going to write.

None of it did anything.

And Cian got weaker, and I got poorer, and neither of those things helped the other.

And I could not understand how I was supposed to do it twice. I had buried my husband. Now I was being told I would bury the boy I had raised on my own, and be left with nobody.

I had imagined all of it. Him growing up. Falling in love. Getting married. Standing in a kitchen somewhere complaining about his own children.