By 37, I'd lost everyone I loved in the world

It was 2am when the door knock came. As a 32-year-old anthropology postgrad student at Roehampton University, I was living alone in a rented studio flat, still up working on my dissertation. Normally I wouldn’t open the door so late but something told me this was important. As soon as I saw it was the police, I knew someone had died.

They told me my dad’s body had been discovered by his cleaner in his Bedfordshire cottage. My friendly pet rat Mr Cuddles heard the voices and popped out to say hello while I babbled that I wasn’t meant to have pets. The officer reassured me it wasn’t his job to police whether people were abiding by the terms of their rental contracts.

A few days later the coroner phoned me with the autopsy results: my father, 69, had died of a massive aneurysm. He’d had a few problems for a while – he was diabetic and had undergone a heart bypass a few years earlier. But he was otherwise healthy and working full-time as an IT consultant. His death was a huge and unexpected blow.