The single dinner plate, the silent house, the tumbler in the sink--this was how it would be if he lost her. His mother had gone quickly, from liver cancer, the mass discovered too late. He thought of his father alone in his condo, crossing off days on the calendar like a prisoner. He'd survived her by thirteen years, yet every time Henry saw him, he quoted her as if they'd just spoken. Henry could picture himself doing the same to the children. He already lived too much in his memory.

It's just a hard moment for him, a low point, not some soul-shaking crisis; you know those aren't sudden or public, they take years, worming inside you like a disease.

Late in life, after his mother had died, his father cried at baptisms and funerals and sappy movies on TV, age stripping away a final protective layer. Now Henry could feel the same softening taking place inside him, a helpless grief for the past and boundless pity for the world, and that was right too. No fool like an old fool.

Grief breaks down all but the crazy; it's a secret of your profession, one people don't want to know.

If all of this has taught you anything, it's that hope is easier to get rid of than sorrow.

There's nothing to do. You've been in the business long enough to understand grief. That's the awful thing: there is nothing to do but go on. You don't want to, you don't want to leave the loved one behind, but you do. Death's taught you that much at least.

It doesn't seem enough, and as he starts them off, you want to call after him, tell him how you too question the ways of faith, the injustice, the never-ending losses, that it stuns you too, that you still grieve for Mrs. Goetz and Arnie and Eric Soderholm just as their families do, though everyone else seems to have forgotten. Lydia Flynn, the tramp behind Meyer's, the men in the swamps of Kentucky. If a sparrow fall, you want to say, it is not lost. I will remember. We are all saved.