For some it is simply crushing.

But for me, in that silent house full of small abandoned objects, it distilled.

The endless days of paperwork, the nights holding Jonathan’s clothes, the mornings passing Samuel’s jacket, all of it burned away everything inessential in me, every last remnant of the daughter who had spent decades hoping to be loved by people who would not come to a funeral, and left behind something clarified and hard and clear.

I knew, by the end of those six months, exactly who I was and exactly what I intended to do, with a certainty I had never possessed in the whole of my comfortable life before the crash.