What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part.

We need imperfection in our relationships, else we would die from the thickness of intimacy.

It’s taken years for me to understand that dying doesn’t end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur, aand epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another’s...

The real hell of this,” he told her, “is that you’re going to get through it.

Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn’t survive.

The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I...

Mostly I couldn’t bear… the paltry notion that memory was all that eternal life really meant, and I spent too much time wondering where people got the fortitude or delusion to keep on moving past...

I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures. …We tell the story to get them back, to capture the traces of...

It’s and old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too.

Counting on each other became automatic. When I found a sweater in Texas I wanted, I learned to buy two, which was easier than seeing the look of disappointment on Caroline’s face when I returned...

Maybe this is the point: to embrace the core sadness of life without toppling headlong into it, or assuming it will define your days.