I can’t remember when people started dying, but it is now in full swing. My father was killed when I was 19, but that was unusual. I had the odd friend with a dead parent but, on the whole, when I went to friends’ houses there would be a whole half-drunk couple there, healthy enough. Perhaps last year, or the year before, people’s parents started dying more often. Too young to die, mostly, early sixties, smokers, drinkers.

I sat on the plane last week next to a friendly couple who had been on holiday in Florence. This was only my third sober flight since 1985 (I get scared, OK?). I needed to chat. I found myself telling them that, these days, it’s funerals I go back for, not weddings or 40th birthday parties. “I suppose it’s because you can’t phone the person to say you can’t make it,” I sighed.

I wore a white fox-fur coat and high heels, overdressed because I had a Prince Yusupov centenary dinner at my old college that night (bizzarely, Yusupov, before he killed Rasputin, was an undergraduate at Oxford).

I drove out to Henley and parked in a field. Directions to the marquee hung jauntily on a gate in a place that once seemed almost like home. It was only as I pulled in to the courtyard and saw the sign saying “Sam’s memorial” that I realised what kind of event this would be, that nobody was going to come away the same.

For Sam, my ex-boyfriend’s brother, dropped dead of a heart attack in August, aged 41. He was fit, healthy, his girlfriend is pregnant with their second child.

It was a grey windy day, with oppressive dark clouds and sharp, low winter’s light. The marquee strained to escape its metal pegs, flapping in the wind. Paddy, my ex, his brother, sisters and his parents, had once felt like my family, and seeing them lost and broken as they were last Saturday was like having an operation without anaesthetic. There was nothing lovely about the service. Memorials, though sad, can be a celebration, a tribute. This was torture. Absolute raw pain and agony.

My father was killed at a similar age, at the same time of year, only just before I met Paddy at Oxford, in fact. So, perhaps there was resonance.

As photos of Sam — hilarious with his siblings round a spindly Christmas tree; thrown into the air by his burly dad; shy in his new glasses — flashed up on a screen, we were struck by the pain of living in a world without the people we love most.

“I kick myself,” one speaker said, weeping, “for all those nights I went to bed early.” Bob Dylan’s You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go played in the cold tent as the photos rolled.

Paddy took me to see the burial site. He was drunk, in a black suit, holding two glasses of wine. We huddled in a golf buggy, battered by the wind, the plot just a mound in a family field. Sam was an evangelical atheist. “Bye, Sam,” we said, driving back, discussing “us”, family, everything that went wrong and right. All those years ago, I thought Paddy, louche, handsome, was Anna Karenina’s Vronsky. Now I saw him with his daughter, his family, so much older, wearier, calmer, and realised that he had been Levin all along.

Those siblings were odd, we all thought, to go home to their parents every weekend. I think I was jealous when I was young, arrogant and stupid, but I didn’t know it. Now my heart burns with love for this family, who knew what mattered all along — being with those you love as much as you can. Because life is brutally short.

Next week : Tom Sykes

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