He was doing the opposite.

By moving, without pause or fuss, from that’s a hard row straight to did you clean your gutters, he was telling me something I needed to hear more than any condolence: that my grief did not disqualify me from ordinary life, that I was not a fragile thing to be handled, that I was still a man among men with gutters to clean before the winter came.

Condolence, however kind, sets you apart; it marks you as the bereaved, the special case, the one to be careful around.

Del’s gutters put me back in the world.

He absorbed the fact of Carol without flinching and then treated me, immediately, as a whole person with a whole life still to live and maintain, and that — not sympathy, never sympathy — was the thing that started bringing me back.

The people who helped me most in my grief were never the ones who dwelt in it with me.