Keeping the house frozen was not love.

It was paralysis.

It was a museum, as I had come to think of it, and a museum is a place where things are kept because they are no longer alive, sealed behind glass, preserved precisely because no one lives with them anymore.

My children were not museum pieces.

Jonathan was not an exhibit.

And loving them did not require me to turn our home into a mausoleum and myself into its lonely, grieving curator for the rest of my life.

There is a difference between carrying your dead and being buried alongside them, and I had, for six months, been slowly climbing into the grave.