It was the physical remainder of his father in the world, the boards his hands had cut, the walls his hands had painted, the one place left where a boy who had lost his father at ten could still, in some sense, live inside something his father had made.

I have come to believe that grief lives differently in children than in adults, that it attaches itself to objects and places with a fierceness that we, who understand that people live on in memory, sometimes forget.

To me, Mark lived in a thousand intangible places, in my memories, in Caleb’s face, in the way I still sometimes turned to tell him something before remembering.

But to a child who had been ten when his father died, whose memories were fewer and more fragile, the tangible things mattered more, held more, because they were solid and would not fade the way a ten-year-old’s memories might.