Grief is grey and damp, a marshland of emotions that suck you in, tendrils of mist that caress you, asphyxiate you.Grieving is the journey you do alone, a penitence, a pilgrimage, an affirmation of being alive in the face of death that shadowsus, every waking moment. Grief was the country I was on apilgrimage within, searching for redemption from my grieving.

There are no ghosts, Pappa said. But Maa always smiled softly when he saidso. There were ghosts, she knew amongst the living and the dead, ghosts of the living and the dead, and often one couldn’t tell the two apart.

She followed him, with the curious camaraderie that comes from having done something death-defying together.

How did other women come to terms with losing a husband? Did they pick up the pieces of their shattered selves and gluethem back together, sealing the joints with metal to prevent them from falling apart again at the slightest whiff of remembrance, motes of a residual ghost perfume, familiar and overwhelmingin a just-vacated elevator, a familiar stretch of shoulder and head in a distance, in a crowd, snatches of a song that had beenplaying when….

They were tied to each other by tenuous bonds that perhaps only death would break.