So I said nothing, and I let the silence be my whole reply, and I turned all of what was left of me toward the terrible clerical work that death leaves behind.

Chapter 6 — The Things They Left

Because grief, I learned, is not only an ocean.

It is also a mountain of paperwork.

Death certificates, in triplicate.

Insurance forms.

Medical records, and police reports, and the settling of accounts, and a hundred small bureaucratic cruelties that require a freshly widowed woman to explain, over and over, to strangers on the phone, that yes, all three of them, yes, at the same time.

I did that work in a house that was still full of them.