Healing grief has a destination; it moves through you toward something, toward action, toward change, toward a locked door and a new life.

Trapping grief has nowhere to go; it circles, and deepens, and becomes an identity, until you are not a woman who was hurt but a woman who is hurt, permanently, as a way of being.

I refused to become the second kind.

I wept for one hour in a hospital bed.

And then I picked up the phone, not because I had stopped hurting, but because I had decided that my hurt was going to build something instead of drowning me.

The planning was not the absence of grief.