When your child dies, the love does not die with them.

It cannot; that is precisely why the grief is so unbearable.

The love remains, at full flood, with nothing to pour itself into, and it becomes agony precisely because it is so strong.

But that same terrible strength — the strength that makes the grief so crushing — is available, if you can find the way to it, as strength for other things.

The love that had made me a devoted mother was still in me, undimmed, after Leo was gone.

Julian saw it flattening me and mistook it for weakness.