I told him about my divorce, which I had never told him, which had happened three years ago and which I had gone through with no family at all because I had cut myself off from the only family I had.

He told me about the nights he’d sat in that recliner with our mother’s hand in his while she called him by our father’s name, and how he’d answered to it, because it made her calm, and how he’d never told anyone that he’d spent two years being his own dead father so his mother could sleep.

I have thought since about why it was possible to say those things that night, when we had not been able to say anything real to each other in nine years, and I think it is this: grief, for all its cruelty, briefly dissolves the armor.

For a little while after someone dies, the ordinary defenses that keep us separate — the pride, the point-scoring, the careful management of how much we let another person see — stop working, because the thing they were protecting against has already happened.