It was Chloe’s handwriting, unmistakably hers, and there is a strange, specific violence in seeing the handwriting of someone you have buried.

We think of the dead as gone, as absence, as silence, and mostly they are, and we make our peace with the silence because there is no alternative.

And then something surfaces, a note, a card, a shopping list in their hand, and suddenly they are not silent at all, suddenly there is their voice, made visible, the exact particular shape of their thought caught in ink, and it is as though they have spoken aloud in the room.

I had a box of Chloe’s old cards that I could not look at more than once a year for exactly this reason.