You just get bigger around it, until there is room in you for the grief and for other things too.

But what no one tells you is that the house does not grieve the way a person does.

The house just goes quiet.

My husband had died years before the children, and so when Ivy and Aaron were gone, the quiet that moved into my home was total.

There was no one to call down to dinner.

No one arguing over the bathroom in the morning.

No music leaking out from under a door, no backpacks dropped in the hall, none of the ordinary racket that I had spent years half-wishing would quiet down and would now have given anything to hear again.