Anyone can feel love, in the large, warm, general way; it is the easiest thing in the world to love someone in the abstract, to be moved by them, to declare it.

What is rare, and what that letter revealed Mark to have possessed to an almost unbearable degree, is the other thing: the patient, specific, clear-eyed attention that actually studies the person you love, that learns their particular fears and needs and weaknesses so precisely that you can predict, in advance, exactly what they will require in a situation you will not even be alive to witness.

Mark did not just love his mother and me warmly.

He knew us.

He had watched us, over years, closely enough to know that his mother’s grief would come out as anger and needed permission, and that my grief would come out as guilt and needed absolution — two completely different needs, in two different people, which a person loving only in the general warm way would never have distinguished.

He had done the work of really seeing us, and because he had, he was able to leave each of us the precise medicine our particular grief would need.