A moment that changed me: I had no understanding of death, then an aunt I hardly knew passed away

I encountered grief for the first time as a boy, overcome by a sudden outpouring of emotion at a funeral. I have experienced it many times since in irrational and alarming ways - or as a peculiar source of comfort

When I was a boy we were not encouraged to think about death, presumably because we could not be expected to cope with such a challenge to the imagination. The closest we got to its complexities was watching Zulu, and the song from Shenandoah, and burying a succession of pets.

Then auntie Flo died. I didn't know her. I must have met her three or four times. I did know that she had been married to uncle John, who was a bit deaf, had been in the war and played tennis to quite a high standard until he got old and had bony claw-like hands with which he used to pat me on the knee. I also knew that she ran a sewing shop somewhere in Stechford, Birmingham, but that was it.