The place had barely changed, which undid me a little as we drove up.

The same low dunes, the same weathered inn, the same particular quality of the light in the late afternoon — as though the sixteen years between my two visits had happened to me but not to this stretch of coast.

I half expected to see us there, the young man and the young woman we had been, walking the tide line with our shoes in our hands.

It is a strange grief, to bring a person’s ashes to the place you were happiest with them.

The joy and the sorrow do not cancel; they sit on top of each other, and you feel both at full strength at the same time, which is almost more than a body can hold.

I stood in the doorway of that rented room and looked at the ocean where I had proposed to her and where I was about to let her go, and for a moment the two moments overlapped so completely that I could not tell which one I was living in.