But grief has a physical presence in a home — anyone who has lived with it knows this — it gets into the plaster and the curtains and the air, it changes the acoustics of the rooms, it makes the silence heavy, a silence you can feel pressing on your chest when you come in from outside.

Our house had been full of that heavy silence since November.

Seven months of it.

It had become the sound of the place, so constant I had stopped hearing it, the way you stop hearing a refrigerator’s hum until the moment it clicks off and the sudden quiet startles you.

And standing in that doorway, watching my brother on his knees by our grandmother’s chair, I felt the heavy silence lift — felt it actually lift, like a held breath finally let go, like a low pressure system moving off a coast.

The quiet in the room was still quiet.