She needed to recover. His father had died in January; it was only the end of May. They needed to stick to the routine they'd established during the intervening months. in that way, their life would return to its original shape, like a spring stretched in bad times but contracting eventually into happiness. That the world could come permanently unsprung had never occurred to him.

You ask, ‘Why am I really fighting this?’ If the answer is ‘Because I’m scared of what things will be like,’ then, most times, you’re fighting for the wrong reason...

That’s just life. You can fight it or you accept it. The only difference is, if you accept it, you get to do other things. If you fight it, you’re stuck in the same spot forever.

Just when normal life felt almost possible - when the world held some kind of order, meaning, even loveliness (the prismatic spray of light through an icicle; the stillness of a sunrise), some small thing would go awry and the veil of optimism was torn away, the barren world revealed. They learned, somehow, to wait those times out. There was no cure, no answer, no reparation.

...do you actually think that how long a person grieves is a measure of how much they loved someone?