For most of my life, I believed that I already understood loss in its deepest form. When I was thirty-two, I lost my wife Mary and our six-year-old daughter Emma in a single night, in a car accident that shattered everything I had built and everything I thought I would ever be. One moment, I was reheating leftovers and waiting for them to come home from visiting Mary’s sister, and the next, I was standing in my kitchen gripping a phone, listening to a stranger’s calm voice explain that my world no longer existed.

There were no screams from me, no dramatic collapse. I simply stood there, staring at the wall, unable to understand how life could erase two people so completely. After that, I didn’t really live anymore. I functioned. I went to work, paid bills, cleaned the house, and slept in a bed that felt too large. Emma’s drawings stayed on the refrigerator until the colors faded into pale ghosts of themselves. Her shoes remained by the door for years. Friends tried to help. My sister called every Sunday. Coworkers invited me out for drinks. I always declined.