On reads Julian Barnes’Levels of Life, which comprise an essay on his personal grief over the loss of his wife Pat Kavanagh, and goes back to Joyce Carol Oates' A Widow’s Story.

(Levels of Life also contain brief biographies of three Balloonists)

Joyce Carol Oates says hospital vigils take place in slow-time during which the mind floats free, a frail balloon drifting into the sky as into infinity.”  (this when her husband was in hospital).

A Widow’s Story deals with the death of Raymond J.Smith, author and editor and Joyce Carol Oates’ husband for 47 years. He died in 2008. Pat Kavanagh, a formidable literary agent, died in the same year. She and Barnes married in 1979 and were together till her death.

Switch over to Karl Ove Knausgaard’s A Death In The Family, My Struggle:1 (My Struggle is an autobiographical series of six novels).  The death of narrator's father.  Knausgaard and his brother Yngve are on their way to the chapel where the Dad was "lying on a bier with his eyes closed and features composed."

Having reached the chapel,  scrambling out of the car…the he reflects:

“Some birds circled high above us, under the sky, which was still a pale grey. The Dutch painter Ruisdael always painted birds high in his skies, to create depth, it was almost his signature, at any rate I had seen it in picture after picture in the book I had about him.”