I did the last offices for him the way I had done them for others, with careful hands, because he deserved to be tended by someone who knew how, and because my hands knowing what to do was, one final time, the truest way I had to love him.

But underneath the steadiness there was a grief so large and so quiet that I have not, if I am honest, ever fully set it down.

Grief that large does not leave.

It just finds a place to live in you, and you build the rest of your life around it, the way a tree grows around a stone.

I would not give it back if I could.

It is the exact size of what he was to me, and I would not trade a single ounce of the weight for a lighter, emptier life that had never held him in it.