There is no gentle way to write that sentence, and I have stopped trying to find one.

One evening I had two children, and a few hours later I had a phone call, and then I had a life that was unrecognizable as my own.

The roads were bad.

It was no one’s fault, which is its own particular cruelty, because grief wants somewhere to put itself and an accident gives it nowhere.

I used to envy, in the worst months, the people whose grief had a villain in it — a drunk driver, a careless doctor, someone to hate.

Hatred at least gives grief a direction to flow.