“We are . . . . so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all,” says Joan Didion in ‘The year of magical thinking’.

“The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we’d done were less real and important than they had been hours before,” writes John Green in ‘The fault in our stars’.

It’s true; nothing will ever be the same again. “The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.”

So says Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, a Swiss-American psychiatrist, pioneer in near-death studies, and author of ‘On death and dying’ (1969), where she first discussed her theory of the five stages of grief: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

“When you experience loss, people say you’ll move through the five stages of grief . . . What they don’t tell you is that you’ll cycle through them all every day,” says Ranata Suzuki.

In ‘A grief observed’, CS Lewis, best known as the author of ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’, writes: “For in grief nothing ‘stays put’. One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?”

Elizabeth Kübler-Ross described the five stages as “defence mechanisms . . . coping mechanisms to deal with extremely difficult situations”. There were never just five stages, though. A graphic in her book describes as many 10 or 13 stages and her son, Ken Ross, says she wasn’t wedded to the idea that you have to go through them in order.

David Kessler believes that the key to grief is meaning – a sixth stage, which he added to Elisabeth’s list. And there are a million different ways to find meaning in the new landscape you suddenly find yourself in.

CS Lewis writes: “Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.” It might also expose a new you lurking in your severed reality. Christopher Moore says that this disconnected reality is typical of a brand new grief. He says that “there’s a fine edge to new grief, it severs nerves . . . there’s mercy in a sharp blade. Only with time, as the edge wears, does the real ache begin.”

“How often – will it be for always? – how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, ‘I never realized my loss till this moment?’ The same leg is cut off time after time,” writes CS Lewis.

He wrote ‘A grief observed’ after he lost his wife, Joy Davidman Gresham, and described his experience of bereavement in such a raw and personal way that he released it under the pseudonym NW Clerk.

CS Lewis writes that no one ever told him that grief felt so very much like fear. “I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.”

“At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in,” he writes.

Frantically trying to keep your world the same after you’ve lost The One is probably the same as saying, “Let’s pretend this never happened.” Loss is going to alter your identity on some level, girlfriend. But I’m starting to realise that it happens as John Green says: Grief doesn’t change you. It reveals you.