They stopped complaining about their own parents when I walked up, cutting themselves off mid-sentence with a guilty look, as though the ordinary griping of having a living mother might wound me, which it did, though not in the way they feared.

They stopped inviting me to things, not out of cruelty but out of a sense that a grieving person surely wouldn’t want to come — and so the choice was made for me, over and over, and I sat home alone confirming everyone’s assumption that I wanted to be.

Grief turns you into something people handle instead of someone they know.

And the worst of it is that you cannot even be angry about it, because they mean well, every one of them means well, and so you just absorb it, and smile, and say you’re doing okay, and watch the gap around you widen one considerate act at a time, until you are standing on your own small island waving at a mainland full of good people who have all silently agreed that the kindest thing they can do is leave you on it.