It was so damn hard to find love in this world, to locate someone who could make you feel that there was a reason you'd been put on this earth. A child, I imagined, was the purest form of that. A child was the love you didn't have to look for, didn't have to prove anything to, didn't have to worry about losing. Which is why, when it happened, it hurt so badly.

He's lighter than you'd think, like whatever was inside him was used up long ago.With that reasoning, it's a wonder I don't float off into the sky.

How could she trust this man, so imprecise with his words, to take care of the burial? To say there had been a loss was ludicrous; one lost a shoe or a pair of keys. You did not suffer the death of a child and say there was a loss. There was a catastrophe. A devastation. A hell.

Maybe you had to come close to losing something before you could remember its value.

In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who lose a child.

Janine had a dozen of responses, all of which were variants of the fact that Joy had made her choice; that she didn't deserve to grieve. She wanted to tell Janine that yes, she had gotten what she wanted, but she also felt the pain of loss, and they were not mutually exclusive.

I knew what it was like to lose someone you loved. You didn't get past something like that, you got through it.

Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect?

He gently touched his mother's cheek, felt her sorrow slip over his fingertips.