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

The real hell of this," he told her, "is that you're going to get through it.

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 thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that graduallu receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity.

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 the static dead.

In the dream I knew she was dead, and I reached out for her and said, "But you're coming back, right?" She smiled but shook her head; her face was a well of sadness.