I felt like an island — a small piece of land with deep water on every side, watching the lights of the mainland where everyone else’s ordinary life went on without me, close enough to see and much too far to reach.

I did not know, that spring, that someone had already been quietly building a bridge.

What made the island so complete was not that people were unkind.

It would almost have been easier if they’d been unkind.

It was that they were kind in a way that kept me at a distance — the careful, tiptoeing, terrified kindness that people offer the bereaved, which is really a kind of quarantine dressed up as compassion.

They lowered their voices around me.