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The Strangeness of Grief (2019)

V. S. Naipaul reckons with the different forms of loss.

Still, during the journey up to London, on the four-pound train, I tried in my cruellest way, and always in vain, to imagine other family members who might have died and whose death might have warranted the sending of a telegram. And it was only when she came to live with me in Wiltshire—a domesticated landscape, the downs seemingly swept every day: no desert here, no wild dogs—that she thought she could risk having another cat, to undo the sorrow connected with the last. And so for a little while the vet continued to come, every four weeks, as he had said, Augustus appearing to revive after each visit, but then relapsing into his increasingly bemused state, his intelligence and physical sharpness now things of the past.

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