A doctor named Salgado had met me there, and explained, gently, that they had attempted resuscitation for nearly half an hour.

“I am so sorry, Mrs.

Vance,” he had said, in that soft, practiced voice doctors use.

“He didn’t respond.” And I had believed him, because why would I not, because I was standing in a clinic beside a sheet-covered body being told by a physician that my husband was gone, and grief had descended on me so total and so instant that I could not think, could not question, could not form a single intelligent inquiry about the circumstances of a healthy thirty-nine-year-old man dropping dead.

That is what grief does, in its first hours: it takes away your capacity to interrogate the very thing you most need to interrogate.