He had built the bookshelves.

He had planted the pear tree.

He had been, from the evidence, a patient man married to an impatient woman, and the house had been organized around that patience, and now the patience was gone and Enid was rattling around inside the shape it had left.

I came to understand, over that first winter, that Enid’s sharpness was not the opposite of grief but a form of it.

People imagine a widow’s mourning as softness — tears, a quaver, a hand pressed to the heart — and some of it is.