My grandmother, who raised me, was in declining health in America about a year and a half ago. I arrived from the UK for a visit, my first in over a year, with my daughter on the Wednesday; my uncle arrived from New York on the Saturday. She had us all there: her children, grandchild and great-grandchild. And on the Sunday, with no real warning, she slipped away. Nothing will ever convince me that she hadn't waited for us all, and I felt so privileged to be there at her time of passing.

I sat with her after she died, and before the undertakers arrived to take her away. That wasn't my grandmother lying on the sofa. As everyone else says, it was just a husk, or a shell. I have no spirituality of any kind, but that sense of there being a life force that had gone was very powerful indeed.