I have come to believe this is what love actually is, underneath the feeling of it: the sustained, humble, attentive work of learning another person so well that you can care for them accurately, meet them where they actually are rather than where it is convenient to imagine they are.

Mark loved us accurately.

And accurate love, I have learned, outlasts the person who gives it, because it leaves behind provisions so exactly fitted to the ones left behind that they go on being cared for long after the lover is gone.

He is four years dead, and he is still, through the accuracy of that letter, taking care of us.

That is the kind of love that does not end.

Not the loud kind.