Forty-one years of marriage had made us familiar; three months at her machine were making us, strangely, intimate, in a way we had somehow never quite been while she was alive to be intimate with.

Grief is supposed to be a taking-away.

No one warns you that it can also, if you are lucky and stubborn, be a slow handing-over — that a person can leave you their hands.

But slowly my hands learned what her hands had known, and there is a thing that happens when you do with your hands the work that someone you loved did with theirs — you come to understand them from the inside, wordlessly, better than a thousand conversations could have managed.

Every seam she’d ever sewed had held.