It measures only how much room the person took up in your heart, and by that measure, the only true one, Julian had taken up a great deal, far more than six weeks should have allowed.

I think, though I did not understand it then, that some part of me had been grieving a father my whole life, mourning an absence, an emptiness where a man should have been, and that when Julian came and briefly filled that emptiness, however incompletely, his death reopened not just the small fresh wound of losing a friend but the enormous old wound of never having had a father at all.

I cried on my apartment floor that morning for a man I had known for six weeks, and for a father I had missed for a lifetime, and I did not yet know that they were the same person, that the two griefs were one grief, that I was mourning, without knowing it, the exact thing I had always mourned.

The funeral was small and quiet.