Just when normal life felt almost possible – when the world held some kind of order, meaning, even loveliness (the prismatic spray of light through an icicle; the stillness of a sunrise), some small thing would go awry and the veil of optimism was torn away, the barren world revealed. They learned, somehow, to wait those times out. There was no cure, no answer, no reparation.

It was one thing to live in a world where death stood a distant figure, quite another to hold it in your hands.

…do you actually think that how long a person grieves is a measure of how much they loved someone?