It is finding one of Maya’s hair elastics in the couch cushions three months on.

It is the last voicemail Adrian left me, about picking up milk, that I cannot delete and cannot listen to.

It is a drawing on the refrigerator whose crayon lines were made by a hand that no longer exists, and a height mark on a doorframe that will never rise another inch, and a half-used tube of the specific bubble-gum toothpaste that only a four-year-old will tolerate, which I could not throw away and could not keep.

Grief, the real thing, is not an emotion so much as a relationship — an ongoing relationship with an absence, conducted through objects, in a house that keeps handing you the people you lost, one small artifact at a time, at the exact moments you are least prepared.