For Six Months After I Buried My Husband and Both My Children, My Family Sent Cheerful Group-Chat Messages and a Party Invitation as if Nothing Had Happened — Then My Name Hit the News Attached to $18.7 Million, and Suddenly Every One of Them Remembered My Number

I used to wish the grief would lessen, in the early days.

Everyone tells you it will; they say time heals, they say it gets easier, they mean to comfort you.

And I have found it to be not quite true, or true only in a way that took me a long time to understand.

The grief did not shrink.

What happened instead is that I grew around it.

It stayed exactly the size it was — the full, unbearable size of three whole people — and slowly, over months and then years, my life expanded outward around that permanent mass, until the grief was no longer the whole of me but a room within me, a room I could close the door on for an afternoon and open again when I needed to go in and be with them.

And I do go in.