Sara Carbonero, the Spanish sports journalist, two weeks after her mother's death, published a letter that put into words what many feel and few manage to write: anger at a life that keeps going as if nothing happened.

"How much I miss you, how much it hurts, mum," she wrote on social media. "What I find hardest is the fact that life goes on as if nothing happened." Sentences that, in their simplicity, hold everything - anger, disbelief, the reminder that grief does not run on a calendar.

Her mother, Goyi Arevalo, died on April 12, 2026, after a long illness. The funeral was in Corral de Almaguer, the family's hometown. Carbonero is 42, has two children, a career the world knows - and yet, like any other person in pain, she wonders whether the phone really will not ring every morning anymore.

"I still think you should be here, that a good run was already coming for you," Sara wrote. The sentence is specifically Balkan in its logic - the idea that life owes a person a good run. Like the mothers here who waited for better times and never lived to see them.

Her sister Irene and Sara are closer now, which is natural - in our part of the world, when the mother goes, the sisters become the only other people who understand what you have lost. That is not sentimental, that is the geography of grief.

Is the pain of losing a mother something you can share with the public? Sara Carbonero chose to - not to ask for sympathy, but, as she herself writes, "to make you proud, to pull a smile from you". She still speaks to her in the present tense. And that is the most honest description of grief you will read this week.