I have thought about how often this must be true, in the last days of the people we love: that some of what looks, from the outside, like withdrawal or distance or a closing-off is actually love doing its quiet final work in the only way it can, in private, in preparation, in the arranging of things the beloved is not yet meant to know.

I was hurt, in those weeks, by my husband’s closed door.

I would give almost anything now to go back and sit outside that door with a full heart instead of a stung one, knowing what I know — that behind it, a dying man was spending his last strength making sure that when he was gone, I would not be alone with my grief, but would have, waiting for me, his voice, his provisions, his love, arranged and sealed and timed to reach me exactly when I needed it.

The closed door was not the absence of his love.

It was the most concentrated form of it.

I only understood that in a hallway, three weeks later, holding an envelope with my name on it.