And that turned out to be, strange as it sounds, the beginning of my healing — that moment of total clarity in the hospital, listening to my husband laugh about my children’s deaths.

Because grief, real grief, requires a real loss, and for a long time after that night I braced myself for the grief I assumed was coming: the mourning of my marriage, of the man I thought I’d loved, of the eight years I’d given him.

But the grief never came, not in the shape I expected, and it took me a while to understand why.

You grieve what was real and is now gone.