Because the coffin was a horror that had been done to me, and horrors done to you, however terrible, at least leave you knowing who you are.

This was different.

This was the discovery that the man I had shared a bed with for seven years, whose moods I could read across a crowded room, whose face I thought I knew better than my own, had a whole other face underneath, one I had never been permitted to see.

Every tender look, every reasonable word, every patient evening — all of it had been the mask, and this cold working thing in the doorway was what the mask had been covering the entire time.

You can grieve a person who dies.