The silence became a presence in its own right.

It had weight.

It followed me from room to room.

And after three years of it, I understood something that frightened me: I was not grieving anymore so much as I was slowly disappearing into that silence, becoming as still and closed as the rooms I could not empty.

I was fifty-something years old and I had stopped, and I knew that if I did not do something, I would simply go on being stopped until there was nothing left of me at all.

That recognition was the thing that finally moved me.