Grief is a landscape of jagged edges, but most people assume there is a floor to the descent. You think the bottom is the moment the officer stands on your porch with his hat in his hands, his lips moving to form the impossible sentence that your mother is gone. You think it is the primal, keening sound your father makes—a sound that seems to split the foundation of your home. I was thirty years old when my mother, Laura, died in a sudden car accident, and for seven days, I believed I was standing on that floor. I was...
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