There is something slightly absurd about running a hotel while grieving.

People arrive in Antiparos happy.

Of course they do. They have been waiting for this week for months. They step off the ferry with sunglasses, linen shirts and the particular expression of people who have finally made it to the place they have been looking at on Instagram all winter.

And my job is to welcome them.

To smile.

To ask how their journey was.

To tell them what time breakfast is, where to swim when the wind comes from the north, which restaurant has the best fish, and why they absolutely should not try to drive down that particular dirt road in a rental car.

Meanwhile, my husband has just died.

This is a surprisingly difficult sentence to fit into hospitality.

There is no box for it in the booking system.

Room 3: anniversary.
Room 6: gluten-free.
Room 7: arriving on the 16:20 ferry.
Owner: recently widowed.

Hospitality is built around a very simple idea: for a little while, somebody else’s happiness matters enormously.

I actually love that idea.

I built a place around it.

Kamao is not just rooms and beds to me. I notice whether the light is right. Whether the music is too loud. Whether someone has been sitting alone by the pool for twenty minutes without being offered a drink.

I want people to feel looked after.

The problem is that grief makes you spectacularly bad at pretending everything is normal.

Some mornings I can talk to guests, solve six problems before coffee and genuinely enjoy hearing about their day.

Other mornings, someone asks me for an extra towel and for one completely irrational second I want to say:

My husband is dead.

Not because they have done anything wrong.

They just want a towel.

And that may be one of the strangest things about grief: the rest of the world continues to have perfectly reasonable requirements.

Flights still get delayed.

Air conditioners still break.

People still want oat milk.

The pool still needs cleaning.

Someone will inevitably ask for a late checkout.

And perhaps, in a strange way, that is useful.

Because grief would happily take up every available room if you let it.

It would occupy the pool, the kitchen, the bar and probably demand a sea view.

But running a hotel doesn’t give it that luxury.

There are people arriving.

There is breakfast tomorrow.

There are flowers that need water and sheets that need changing and a sunset happening at approximately the same time it happened yesterday, with absolutely no regard for what happened to my life.

So I keep moving.

Not because I have “moved on.”

I hate that expression.

I am beginning to understand that you don’t move on from someone you loved for most of your adult life.

You move with them.

Apparently, you can carry a person who is no longer here while carrying someone else’s suitcase upstairs.

You can miss someone desperately and still care whether the rosé is cold.

You can cry at 9:15 and recommend a beach at 9:30.

Both things can be true.

This summer, I am learning that grief and hospitality have something unexpected in common.

They both ask you to make room.

For people.

For memories.

For joy when it appears without permission.

For sadness when it does the same.

And occasionally, for a guest who would really, really like a late checkout.

That one, unfortunately, is still subject to availability.