There is no natural order in which a parent buries a child; it runs backwards against everything, it is the one loss the human heart is simply not built to absorb, and Evelyn had absorbed it at eighty, with a failing body, in the same season her own strength was leaving her.

And yet in seven months I had almost never seen her weep.

She had let me grieve — she had held me while I fell apart more than once — but she had done her own grieving somewhere I could not see it, in the private hours, folded up small and put away, so that when I came into a room she would have her face arranged into something steady and warm for me.

I understand now that this was not because her grief was smaller than mine.