I think a part of me understood, even in the first shock of it, that I could not afford to fall apart yet, that there would be time for falling apart later and that this was not it.

My husband was somewhere in this building, alive, and he had been suffering alone for six months, and whatever I was feeling in that consultation room was smaller and less urgent than getting to him.

So I did the thing I had learned to do in eleven years as the steady one at home while he was the steady one at work: I put my own collapse aside, and I stood up straight against that wall, and I made my mind keep working.

There would be a great deal of grief in the days and months to come, oceans of it.