‘When JK Rowling writes that love is Harry Potter’s secret weapon, she is spot on. A gas-covered rock encircling a nuclear fireball is all we are without it,” declares my friend Pete. “Adam understands the power and breadth of love better than any of us.” It’s that stage of the evening when wine loosens dinner guests’ tongues, and talk turns to house prices, schools or the meaning of life.

We are languishing in the lounge, liberated from charging home after dinner at midnight by understanding babysitters or older children at home, so are able to talk absolute bollocks into the small hours.

Pete has gone for option three, his locution on life inspired by much malt whisky as he sits centre stage, looking and sounding like a supersize Yoda with a script by Douglas Adams. So the chat whispers and roars around the power of love and the void of its absence.

It is a scene that has played out many happy times, but one in which my being the odd number at the table underlines once again that Helen is missing. Later, when glasses are empty and taxis full, I am last to leave when the host, also called Helen, asks: “You’ve been quiet and look a bit upset, Adam. I hope the talk about love and its loss wasn’t hurtful? Pete’s just Pete.” I reassure her it’s someone else who has made me thoughtful about loss. “I’m fine. It’s not Pete but Brendan Cox.” She looks a little surprised, but waves cheerily as I try to marshal my mind by walking home.

Being bereaved, one of the things that helps one cope is remembering there are people whose loss must be harder than one’s own. For me, those whose bereavement is unexpected or inexplicable makes me grateful and humble that Helen and I had time together to talk, laugh and love.

Others, such as Way (Widowed & Young) mate Jeannie, whose husband took his own life, had none of that comfort; nor did Brendan Cox when his wife, the MP Jo, was murdered, leaving him with their very young children.

Cast overboard into the sea of despair that is bereavement, you grab hold of whatever looks like it might float. With luck, it’s a life raft, but it might be a chest of drawers that will fill with water and sink; either way, you still reach for it. Cox has not just been treading water but striking out through it brilliantly, in what he has been doing and saying, since his wife’s death.

Most recently, he used his experience to speak with good sense to a reporter about the need to acknowledge the heroes of the Westminster attack rather than concentrate on the villain. He didn’t even respond to the reporter mentioning Jo’s murderer’s name immediately after he had said: “I hated hearing and seeing the name of the person who killed Jo …”

I was struck then, and am reminded after dinner now, of Cox’s referring to the “thousand kindnesses that people showed”. It prompts me to wonder whether the most potent, underrated and misunderstood facet of our lives is perhaps not love but kindness. It lives in the soft touch of helping a lost tourist or the hard action of providing first aid to an injured one on Westminster Bridge. For most of us, our kindness quota is not met by a single act of benevolence but a long trail of small kindnesses that, hopefully, add up to a life well lived.

Looking back over my own journey, kindness has been the consistent companion to my re-emergence from deep grief, from unsolicited lasagnes to calls for coffees, concern, cake and care of kids.

I am certainly kinder than I was, and more aware and supportive of the struggles of others. Perhaps this is another of Helen’s legacies. Her death casting me adrift in choppy waters is less a Shakespearian sea change but more a “C change”, in which the C is fucking cancer. If kindness is in many ways just love given form, it would be true that “the essence of love is kindness”, thus making Robert Louis Stevenson, who said it, and Pete, who echoed it, right yet again. How annoying. How brilliant. How kind.

Adam Golightly is a pseudonym

@MrAdamGolightly