Not guilt.

I do not feel guilty and I have looked for it.

What I feel, about four times a year, usually triggered by something absurd — a woman in a supermarket with the same haircut, a particular kind of coat — is straightforward grief, of the kind you feel for somebody who has died.

Because in a sense the woman I had for thirty-eight years did die, on a Christmas afternoon in a study in Wilmington, at the moment she glanced at an envelope for less than a second and said I don’t know what that is.

I have a mother who is alive and I have lost my mother, and both of those are true at once, and I have found that people cannot hold both, so I mostly do not say it.