I walked up the wet grass and I knelt down in the drizzle between the two graves, my parents’ graves, side by side at last after a lifetime kept apart, and I laid a small bouquet of white lilies across the damp earth between them.

I had never, in my whole life, been able to visit my parents together.

I had grown up with one of them and buried her alone, and I had not even known the other existed until he was already gone.

And now here they were, together, and here was I, kneeling between them in the rain, a daughter with both her parents at last, even if only their names in stone.

There is a particular ache in visiting, for the first time, a grave you should have been visiting your whole life.