We tend to forget how much WW2 was still part of the culture back then. And yes, Sunday drives – and stopping at roadside produce stalls on the way back. I carried that through to our family life: drive out to Muriwai, then fruit and veges on the way home.

Dude. We're only supposed to discuss those things IN CODE.

That's great. And what a cool location!

And I think that's enough on this topic for a while, but I'm glad these thoughts have resonated with people, and maybe helped someone a bit. Have a good day.

"Perhaps the new normal is, if not yet here, now visible on the horizon. To anyone else who finds themselves shockingly trudging towards that horizon, the advice I would offer is the advice I got. There are good days and bad days. Also, you're doing well."

"The decades Fiona and I spent together remain part of the sum of my experiences, yet they are receding. The thought still shocks me.
No, you can't reflect your way out of it, but reflection has value. At any rate, I've never been good at not thinking.

"And then our brains note that the world is not as predicted and accordingly adjust the connections between neurons that form our idea of the world and ourselves. It feels like a blur because we're rewriting ourselves in light of a new reality and new expectations.

"It was a comforting belief, as if nothing had really changed, but in truth, everything had. To expect otherwise would be to invite what the neuropsychologists call a prediction error – yet that's what we do.

"Those expectations, which may span our entire sense of ourselves, are based on the sum of all our experiences, material and emotional. For a few weeks after Fiona died, it was possible to believe she was still there, reliably written into my brain, available for reference.

"In neuroscience, the theory of predictive coding, which developed as a way of explaining visual perception, holds that our experience of what the world sends at us is mostly a set of models about what we *expect* to experience.

"It's six months since Fiona died and the time is a blur, as if it all happened to someone else. In some sense, it did.

Because I'm a nerd, I've been fretting that I didn't quite get the wording right about what I think happens in our brains when we grieve. I've tweaked that part of the column, added a bit and edited it down to the following. I did say I'm a nerd ...

Exactly.

It would very much appear not.