Grief for the dead, however unbearable, has a strange mercy in it: it is final.

The worst has happened, and there is nothing left to fear, and nothing left to do but mourn, and over years the mourning wears itself into a smooth and survivable shape.

I had made my peace, as much as a father can, with a dead son.

I had built a whole life around the smooth stone of that grief.

What broke me, in that truck, weeping over a lab report, was that the smooth stone had shattered and underneath it was something far more dangerous than grief, which was hope.

Because grief only asks you to endure.