The central fact of it is that there was never a living person — that the loss and the birth are the same event, and there is nothing before and nothing after, and the work is to grieve somebody you never met.

I was good at it.

That is a strange thing to say and it is accurate.

I went to a group on Thursdays for nine months.

I read four books.

I did the thing they tell you to do, which is to say his name out loud regularly, and I said it in the car about two hundred times.

And the thing I built, over eleven months, was an idea of a boy who had never been anywhere.

That is the phrase I used, in my own head, dozens of times. He was never anywhere. It was a comfort.