I have thought since that he probably had known, that he could feel the tide going out, and that he had chosen those last gentle words deliberately, as he seemed, I would learn, to have chosen so much deliberately.

When the nurse’s call came, I sat down on the floor of my apartment and cried the way you cry for family, the deep involuntary grief that surprised me with its size, because on paper Julian had been a stranger I had known for six weeks, and yet the hole he left in me was the size of something much larger than that.

I have learned since that grief does not check your paperwork.

It does not care how long you knew a person, or what the official nature of your relationship was, or whether the world would consider your sorrow proportionate.