My Husband Cooked Dinner, and Minutes After My Son and I Ate, We Both Collapsed. I Played Dead on the Floor and Heard Him on the Phone: “Soon They’ll Both Be Gone”

And the blue plate was no longer a plate at all.

I have come to think this is the part no one warns you about, in the after.

Not the fear, which everyone expects, and not the anger, which everyone understands.

It is the strange, permanent haunting of ordinary things.

For months, I could not open a freezer — any freezer, anywhere, a friend’s, a grocery store’s — without my hand going still on the door and my mind sliding, unbidden, back to a bag of peas in the dark.

A kitchen timer, a fork set down on a napkin, the particular blue of a dinner plate in a shop window: any of them could reach out and take the ground from under me without warning.