It always starts on an ordinary day.

Your phone buzzes, and you go searching (it’s always on vibrate, like most of us seem to prefer now).

A voice on the other end, slightly too careful, says a sentence with a pause in the middle, and the bad news sits in that pause, waiting to be picked up.

I’ve taken that call more than once now, for more than one person I love, and every time I’ve been in the middle of something. Waiting for the kettle to boil. Halfway through eating. Something else entirely. And every time, the same thing happens. The call ends, the kettle clicks off, and I don’t move.

I go numb. It doesn’t matter who it is, or what the doctors eventually call it. I talk normally, I eat, I reply to messages, I probably even get angry at something random. From the outside, I’m sure I look fine. Inside, everything has been turned right down, like a radio playing in a distant room.

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For years I worried about that numbness. I wondered whether it made me cold and a bit odd, whether some essential part of me had failed to switch on at the moment it was needed most. I understand it a little better now. The feeling is all there, every ounce of it. It simply has nowhere to go.

I’ve written before about how I don’t really cry in front of people, and how bad news tends to catch up with me later, usually when I’m on my own. But grief, at least, comes after something has happened. When someone is ill, or something sudden has happened to them, nothing has finished happening yet. It’s all still going on, and I’m stuck off to one side of it, waiting.

And waiting, I’ve realised, means being useless. I’m not very good at being useless. For most of my life, when something has gone wrong, there has usually been something I could do about it. I think a lot of us are like that, particularly the ones who were never taught to say the soft things out loud.

Usefulness became the language. You carry the heavy bag. You find the lost passport, fix the Wi-Fi, drive to the airport at an hour when nobody should be awake, and make the decision at the restaurant while everyone else is dithering.

An unexpected crisis or illness doesn’t really allow for that. It takes the verb away, leaving you holding the noun. And when there’s nothing to do, it can feel as though there’s no way left to love someone at all. That isn’t true, of course. But it’s how it feels at the time.

And the noun is enormous. It fills the room. It sits beside you in hospital corridors that hum with a fluorescent patience of their own, in waiting areas where the chairs are bolted together as though someone once tried to leave with one. It follows you home and waits at the foot of the stairs. You carry it everywhere, this great weight of love with no handle on it, and there is nowhere to set it down.

They may not be drowning. But they’re moving at a speed and in a direction that has nothing whatsoever to do with you. And you are on the bank. You walk alongside, keeping pace as best you can, stumbling over roots, calling out things that the water swallows before they arrive. You can’t go in after them. That was never one of the options. All you can do is refuse to stop walking.

Sometimes you aren’t even on the bank.

Some of the people I love live in other countries, in time zones I still have to count on my fingers, and when they’re unwell the river is a phone screen. You read the family group at one in the morning and again at six, as though the words might have changed while you slept. You look for clues in the words. You check flights you can’t quite book yet, at prices that change every time you refresh. I used to think distance would soften it somehow. It doesn’t. The person pacing the corridor outside the ward and the person pacing a kitchen 3000 miles away are feeling similar things.

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There are always two of “me” when this happens. One does all the practical stuff. He looks at logistics, checks flights and train times, transfers money, rings doctors, offices, and people he’s never met, and writes everything down in a notebook he’ll never look at again. He makes coffee nobody really wanted and goes to the shop for things that aren’t needed. He wipes down counters that were already clean and puts on a wash that could have waited. He asks the same questions twice and reads things online at midnight that he’d have been better off not reading. People are kind about all of it and say thank you, and he knows full well that none of it has made the slightest difference to how they feel.

The other one just wants to be in the room, holding a hand and saying nothing at all. I suspect anyone who has been through this knows both of them. The first is easier to be, and if I’m honest, he’s partly there for my benefit. Being useful gives the worry somewhere to go. It’s an uncomfortable thing to admit, that part of wanting to help is wanting to feel less helpless yourself. The second one is usually the one they need. He’s also the one distance takes away first.

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As a boy I thought of it as ritual, the sort of thing grown-ups did because their grown-ups had done it. I think about that lamp differently now. I think it was a place to put the hands. A way of giving the wanting a shape, something to tend, something to keep alight when everything else was out of reach. Whether anyone was listening on the other side of the flame almost didn’t matter. The lighting of it was the prayer.

I’ve often wondered, on the longer nights, whether helplessness is simply what love looks like once the scaffolding comes down. All that doing, all those years of lifts and errands and fixing things, was holding something up. Take it away, and you finally see the shape of the building. Bare and a little frightening and much bigger than you realised. I don’t know if that’s true. It feels true at three in the morning, which isn’t always the same thing.

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Sitting is the hardest thing I have ever been asked to do. You sit quietly, and you notice things. The pattern on a blanket. The way a hand you’ve known your whole life now holds a cup with more care than before, as if the cup has become heavier while you weren’t looking. The rise and fall of a chest that you find yourself counting without meaning to, the way you once counted the seconds between lightning and thunder as a child, to work out how far away the storm was.

I’ve sat in a lot of chairs now. Beside beds, in corridors, and at my own kitchen table with a phone face up in front of me. Long evenings in rooms where there was nothing to fix and nothing to carry.

I still don’t move when the kettle clicks off. I’ve just stopped thinking of that as a failure. After a call like that, there’s only the waiting, and the odd, heavy nothing of being there.

In the hope that, for them, nothing feels a little like company.