The writer describes how teaching a little-known children’s book by Mary Lamb soon after his father’s death unexpectedly helped him confront his own grief. The experience matters because it shows how literature can make private loss easier to recognise and share, even across large distances of time and circumstance.

His father, whose alcoholism had worsened over decades, died of liver failure shortly before Christmas. In Mrs Leicester’s School, Lamb’s story “Elizabeth Villiers, or The Sailor Uncle” portrays a child learning to understand her mother’s death after seeing adult relatives grieve; its message to show kindness before loved ones are gone moved the writer to tears during a university lecture, alongside at least one student.