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

And still, somehow, they found the strength to hold up their daughter-in-law.

I have thought about that a great deal since.

About where a person finds that.

I have concluded that grief comes in two kinds, and that the funeral showed me both, standing on opposite sides of the same church.

There is the grief that turns a person inward, that becomes a wall, that says I am in too much pain to have anything left for you — and there is the grief that somehow turns a person outward, that becomes a bridge, that says we are both drowning, take my hand. I would not have believed, before that day, that the second kind was even possible, that a mother who had just lost her only son could stand at his grave and spend her failing strength holding up someone else.

But Adrian’s mother did exactly that.