And then I drove home to my three daughters and to a dinner table with four empty places at it, and I tried to begin the impossible work of building a life around a hole the exact shape of half my family.

People speak of moving on, as though grief were a place you could leave.

It is not a place.

It is a shape, cut out of the middle of your life, and you do not move on from it so much as you learn to walk around it, to set the table around it, to raise your daughters around it, to go on living in a life with a hole in the center that never once, in six years, grew smaller.

You simply grow, slowly, a little larger than it, until it is a part of you that you carry rather than a pit you keep falling into.