The quiet nearly killed me.

For twenty-two years my life had been noise and motion and three girls needing three different things at the same moment, and now there was just me and the ticking of the radiator and three empty rooms.

I would catch myself making too much dinner out of habit.

I would hear a sound in the night and half-rise to check on someone before remembering there was no one to check on.

People warn you about the empty nest and you nod and you do not understand, and then it arrives and it turns out to be a kind of grief — the strangest, best kind, the grief of a job you did so well that it finished.

I missed them with my whole body.