Ashes.

It was Wednesday night, and my grandmother's ashes were running through my hand like the sand in an egg-timer.

In this case, though, when they are gone, there is no inverting the egg-timer to watch them dribble away anew: it is over.

The ashes came in an olive-green cardboard box, heavy and impersonal, and I was handed them by my father with the words: there's your gran, and a gesture which suggested we should go ahead and do what was inevitable.

My father is full of very difficult love: I suspect it is unique to the north of England, or to men of his generation, or to men of his generation from the north of England. It is a love which speaks of anything other than what it is. 'There's your gran' is not designed to wound the recipient, and is more than a mere statement of fact. It is in actuality a tribute, and a paean to loss.

'There's your gran' are the words of a man who is frozen with grief; who can't dislodge the bullet of having had to watch his mother die in a hospital bed. To my father, love is expressed with a mock aggression which overlays a river of tenderness. I am told that as my grandmother opened her eyes for the last time, my dad said: you've decided to have a bloody look at me, have you? and moments later, she had ceased to be.

Sometimes, in the madness of a kiss, the rage of the moment causes us to utter: I love you, as soon as the kiss is broken, and then immediately regret it. In those instances, word gets the better of deed, and we admonish ourselves. In the case of my father, there is no case of tongue outflanking censorship - it is just difficult love, consisting of five going on six decades of reinforcement of the idea that emotion is tantamount to a sin for a man, an unwelcome refinement.

Yet, inadvertently, my wonderful father, despite his best efforts, unthinkingly made the gesture that absolves him of any historical grievances. That is, dad's emotions rushed upwards to speak to me, and in doing so made the once-in-a-lifetime offer which signified the enduring love a father has for his (frustrating and under-achieving) offspring.

We were each taking some ash, and sprinkling it on the land behind my grandmother's house. The other side of the neighbour's chicken run, over the grass, beneath the apple tree; the blowback was covering our faces and hair; my hands were grey.

When the plastic container was down to a handful, he asked: does tha want the last bit? and I refused, watching the last remnants dwindle away, pressing my head into his back in tears and knowing that his question had changed the nature of our relationship forever.

Distance.

To sympathise with someone whose long-distance (initiated-online) relationship has just ended, it takes someone who has experienced the same thing.

I've seen the reaction of others for myself - trying their hardest but failing to understand how losing someone who lives an ocean away is more painful than splitting with a partner who lives on the next street.

It is more painful because people in long-distance relationships eventually exhaust themselves in the name of the beloved. Conventionally, it is sufficient to say: this is what I am, and I hope it's acceptable to you. If not, we can cut our losses without too much trauma.

When the beloved is thousands of miles away, however, everything is acceptable and everything is permissible. I always warned Bluefish not to expect a god, but just a man. Not an infallible, but someone who has to go to work, and has suffered with depression, and struggles to complete basic tasks. Without such frequent warnings, I feared that Bluefish's most cherished wishes would come to be projected upon me, and of course I should fail to live up to them.

The difference is, then: when in a conventional relationship, it is normal to demonstrate your best qualities in order to become more desirable. When in a long-distance relationship, these qualities have to be suppressed, and their suppression leads to exhaustion due to the mental exertion required to keep them in check.

The energies which sustain the two types of relationship differ, too. Conventionally, we exist in the moment, like Buddhists. I feel love, and so I express it. I feel sadness, until your eyes solve the misery. You can't sleep until my voice delivers rest. We exist, here and now, and nothing is more important than the present.

Long-distance, however, only the future is of any consequence. Just three more months, darling. What I live for is the moment we are brought together; you exiled from your hot, dusty land and flung into this cold, impersonal one. The present is insignificant, because you are not physically in my present, with your appearance of an angel, and so I turn my back on the present, and hibernate until such time as you arrive. Only another month now. Keep holding on for me, for us, against the odds.

Yes, only someone who's experienced those dynamics can truly sympathise when someone else's long-distance relationship ends. It's the difference between an uncertain future and no future at all; the difference between a subliminal flicker of beauty across the eyeball and no beauty at all.

I know the sickness, and the misery, and the lack of closure, and the sense that it's all been for nothing anyway. Like everything, though - even love itself - I know those feelings don't last forever, and once you've begun to make a recovery, then you can hoard the memories and sentiments that are inviolable, and speak to you of a truth which no-one else can share.

An unbreakable truth? Surely, then, there is nowhere else to go, and you might as well give up on men - both local and online - forever, because the most pious symbols of love have already been written and arranged? Not so.

Human beings are creatures of the present. Ask them for their best 100 songs or books of all time, and close to the top you'll inevitably find music and literature released within the last few months, because the zeitgeist is so overwhelming. This bias towards the very recent is understandable, but if it can be overcome, then the future is not so bleak, and we can face it with the lessons of the past - most of them positive - as ballast for the unknown, exciting future.

Evidence.

If anyone wanted circumstantial evidence for the non-existence of God, it is there in their own synapses.

Buddhists apart, all Gods that have ever been created are covered in the fingerprints of human creativity - there's the one who was given birth to by a mere mortal, there are the ones with the human qualities of vengeance and jealousy, and there are the ones who take an unhealthy interest in our comings and goings.

No, there is nothing there worth worshipping in such a creature, who stands over us like an imposing, admonishing colossus, but a colossus with the same seeds of downfall as the scurrying ants he surveys.

Are we, in the 21st century, supposed to suspend our disbelief to the extent that petitioning a deity could ever have real, measurable results?

Oh, Lord, I am suffering, for someone dear to me has departed and now rests eternally in your kingdom. I throw myself upon your wisdom as I seek not only explanation, but comfort - and, in return, I pledge absolutely nothing. Not only an omniscient God, but a benevolent one, a foolish God providing the ultimate free lunch.

The funeral, and the beautiful words of the charming Reverend Sue; the poetry readings and the committal of the body to Christ; the singing of Abide With Me and the journey to the crematorium on a day when it seemed the whole of nature had come out to say goodbye - crows circling the hearse in respect, and fields of corn bowing in the wind - what greater tribute to the glory of religion could one ever wish for?

And yet, I suspect it's nothing more than a sham, akin to the veneer of civilisation, the result of penetrating which is to fall helplessly out of one's species, to become an outsider. We are not condemned as outsiders when we prick the bubble of religion, but we instead must steel ourselves to look at a universe which is indifferent to the plight of humanity, a plight which is summed up by Reverend Sue: we know and understand 'life's little day.'

A true god should be incomprehensible to us, and be far too un-human to care who dies, and who's in anguish. This sort of entity would be no less than the mechanistic universe itself, creating and destroying stars and galaxies and planets, and meanwhile the inhabitants of thisplanet proselytise and beg for comfort, like children.

Emergence.

The last thing in the world I want to do at the moment is to write, and yet I know I must do it if I'm to avoid descending into illness.

All week, those who care about my well-being have been asking how I am. There's only so many ways to say you're fucking awful before boredom sets in. Grief is tedious, orbiting unendingly around the same small flame, so that nothing new is gained.

It's odd that I mention repetition and tedium in the same sentence. Normally, we say that practising something over and over is the road to perfection, and is seen as a virtue. Yet in this case it's nothing more than a tiresome mental tic which it is best to put a stop to.

I recall stating before that it's possible to listen to a significant piece of music so many times that it eventually loses all its emotional power, and I'm now beginning to think that grief is just an extension of this process.

Grief is about draining the attachment to the past, and its network of associations, until we can think of that which has departed without collapsing in tears. And, for your author, charting the progress as the attachment diminishes is important.

At 03:37, the last thing in the world I want to do is write, and yet I am left with no choice because each word promises a return to normality - somehow, eventually, inevitably.

I am not yet able to write properly, with conviction and the whole gamut of emotions condensed into a sentence - but it is better than nothing. Words make me feel sick, and yet despite the nausea I can still shape them, even though the tiredness and lack of confidence is there for all to see.

Body.

My father asked if I wanted to see my grandmother's body, and I refused.

Both parents went to see her, adorned with purple flowers, and the head which age had caused to slump to one side now straightened at last.

I was assured she is at peace, and it has even been said that she now exudes a permanent look of happiness. Nevertheless, it was more than I could do to look for myself.

In previous posts, I remember mentioning some of the television images which terrified me as a child: Kennedy's brain being scrambled by an assassin's bullet; the Turin Shroud; the mask of Tutankhamun; an anti-smoking advertisement showing a diseased lung with a doctor pointing at the most damaged parts with a stick or wand of some description.

I keep myself far from death, even as it is theoretically around the next corner. I am scared to acknowledge it lest a vague acquaintance turns stalker, misting up the windows of my flat with its kisses; sending its blankets through the mail; wrapping me around its finger as I sleep; composing threatening missives from NatWest that call in the debt.

Yet tomorrow, I have to look death in the eye, and he'll no doubt make a note of my name. This is what I did to your grandmother, progressively cutting away at her earthly ties, severing them one by one until she found rest.

If only the western mind could shed itself of the image of the grim reaper, the dark giant with a scythe on an insane, endless rampage. If only this western mind could!

If only the bleak synopsis could be dissolved, that of the infinite gathering its harvest. No-one, least of all your author, sees death as the gift which comes when all our work is done and all our lessons learned.

No, it takes an Elisabeth Kübler-Ross to do that, to free us from frightening images, to cease the lips which utter bitter comparisons between death and taxes. Kübler-Ross would have it that the untethered soul of my grandmother is now floating brightly like a gaudy shirt on a line or a butterfly, adjacent to that of the husband she lost too quickly.

On the eve of the funeral - it starts in ten hours - I thus know that the body which is left behind and which I cannot let my eyes turn towards, is nothing more than a vessel which carried my grandmother's energy, and that energy returned to the cosmos last week.

It is long gone, the arrears settled with nature, and becoming the soil, the breeze, the trees, a cycle to which we attribute petrifying mental pictures and fearsome titles.

The pictures, the soubriquets, do nobody any good. It is natural, nothing more, and the inevitability of death should not cause one to freeze. Perhaps in future I might convince myself that I said no to the visit because the husk I would see is no more my grandmother than the photograph of her that I have, but between the reader and I, there is still some way to go until I reach that exalted state of mind.

Monday.

My grandmother died on Monday morning.

I woke up late, to at least ten missed phonecalls, and I didn't even have to ring any of the numbers to know what had happened.

I saw it in a dream on Friday, anyway, my mother's voice saying: she's gone, and I twisted like a snake in my bedclothes as the shock jolted me awake.

As it turned out, she was still alive at the point I did speak to my mother, and this time it wasn't a dream. You better come, because yer gran's on her way out. I threw on whatever clothes I could find, and commenced the race which I knew I was never going to win.

I dashed out of the flat, making for the train station as fast as I could. I'd got as far as the street named after an Australian city, where I'd lived until April, when my phone rang again. I couldn't make anything out at the other end, and I said: has it happened? ended the call, and began to cry. It was 11:25am.

When someone dies, it is beyond me to know what it is appropriate to do. Is it right to buy a newspaper to read on the train (even though I'm already too late?) Is it right to accept a sandwich and a cup of tea? Is it appropriate to feel a sense of loss one minute, and the next minute derive some sort of satisfaction because her suffering has drawn to a close at last, a good two years or so after her remaining quality of life dwindled away?

For the last couple of years, we had to watch as my grandmother was pared down by age, in the same way the water carves away at the body of a stricken ship, capitalising on its immobility and helplessness to sweeten the flesh which drops away in intervals the eye can measure. The last time I ever saw her, what remained of her mind had broken off and, thus lobotomised, she addressed my father and I only in shouts of pain, the sorts of sound made by cattle in distress, otherwise never opening her eyes.

I've not yet realised she's gone. I said before that bad news comes from the stars - it takes a long time to reach its intended recipients. That I dare not even go to see the body (of which more later) means that I cannot accept that the marbling stillness into which my grandmother has been transformed was once animate, and therefore I cannot yet accept her death.