She took her own loss and turned it, on the spot, into the exact medicine I needed — used the hole in her own life to show me the shape of what I still had and was on the verge of throwing away.

That is a kind of love most people are not capable of, the love that hands you the lesson your grief taught it and asks nothing back.

She could have made me feel guilty.

Instead she made me feel lucky, and then she made me act on the luck.

I think of Ray sometimes now, Bev’s Ray, gone four years, when Hal and I are dancing in the kitchen.

I think that some of that dancing is Bev’s, is Ray’s, is a debt I pay by refusing to waste the thing they lost.