Rinsing that cup was the first small act of climbing back out.

It was me deciding that I would take Jonathan and Samuel and Charlotte with me into whatever life remained — carry them in the foundation, in the oak trees, in the shape of the person their love had made me, in the safer road and the protected children and the thousand ways their memory would go on doing good in the world — rather than staying frozen forever in the doorway of the morning they died.

The dead do not need us to stop living.

They need us to live in a way that carries them forward.

I put the cup in the cabinet, and I went outside to the three young trees, and for the first time since a phone rang in a chapel, I let myself begin, very quietly, to live again.