Not because he was wrong — he was not wrong — but because it sounded so much like being told to let my husband and sons go, to fold them up and put them away.

I never did.

And I did not understand, then, why a grieving brother would work so hard to close a door I only wanted to look through.

I understand it now.

He was not protecting me from a painful nothing.

He was standing, without my knowing it, in front of a painful something, and he had decided, wrongly and out of love, that I was better off never seeing it.

Chapter 10 — Six Years