The rain had finally stopped and it was almost 11pm as I spotted my old friend the huge oak tree at the bend in the road. Like a sentinel, it signaled that our driveway was just ahead.

Maggie was still asleep. It had been a grueling day. We had left for Houston at 5am to have plenty of time to make our appointment with the doctor. I told her we should just spend the night and drive back in the morning but she hates sleeping anywhere but her own bed and there are our two Labradors. Maggie wouldn’t have been okay leaving them alone overnight anyway, so I didn’t fight her about the 12-hour round-trip drive.

In 1989 we bought a 30-acre abandoned farm outside Houma, Louisiana, mainly because we needed a new start after losing Layla, but also because we were tired of the city life in New Orleans.

Both Maggie and I had grown up in small towns in the South, so we jumped at the chance to simplify and slow down in the beautiful, pastoral, delta country of southern Louisiana.

It’s funny how people return to their roots when they are in crisis. Neither Maggie nor I realized it at the time, but the crushing grief that engulfed us after Layla passed was changing everything in our lives, and here again now grief had returned and I didn’t know how I was going to bear it.