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

Grief is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a Band-Aid
being ripped away, taking the top layer off a family. And the underbelly
of a household is never pretty, ours no exception. There were times I
stayed in my room for days on end with headphones on, if only so that I
would not have to listen to my mother cry. There were the weeks that my
father worked round-the-clock shifts, so that he wouldn't have to come
home to a house that felt too big for us.

She has never been a pretty crier. She sobbed the way she did everything else - with passion and excess. That she had managed to keep it inside her this long was astounding to James. He thought of pushing open the half-closed door and kneeling before his wife, wrapping his arms around her shoulders and helping her upstairs. He raised his hand, stroking the wood of the door, planning to say something to calm her. But what wisdom could he offer Gus, when he could not even heed it himself? James walked upstairs again, got into bed, covered his head with a pillow. And hours later, when Gus crept beneath the sheets, he tried to pretend that he did not feel the weight of her grief, lying between them like a fitful child, so solid that he could not reach past it to touch her.

Grief is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a Band-aid being ripped away, taking the top layer off a family. And the underbelly of a household is never pretty, ours no exception.

You have to understand what you’re missing before you can really feel a loss.

See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it. And the very act of living is a tide: at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one day you look down and see how much pain has eroded.