Watching a brilliant man, whom I had admired all my life, fade away was torture. He followed my mother three months ago, and I could not accept a world without them.

They say that losing your parents in adulthood is easier. It turned out that was a lie. You need your mother and father at any age, and my orphanhood was excruciating.

After my father’s death, I inherited a spacious one-bedroom apartment. Long ago, back in Soviet times, he had been given a three-room apartment as a scientist, after I was born