A marriage certificate is not a piece of sentiment.

It is an instrument that changes about forty things about your legal position, most of them silently, and it does it the same afternoon.

Some of what it did was the point, and I had thought about those.

I became his next of kin, which is why the hospice called me at twenty past four in the morning rather than a county number.

I became the person with legal authority over his remains — although, as it turned out, he had already signed a document in August that would have carried that regardless.