The sharks’ faces grew familiar as they swam by me. The animals passed through the same route, nearly brushing a fin against the glass. One after another, again and again. The cycle grew dull for me. As I peered into the glossy eyes of my new found fin-friends, I wanted to ask: Are you bored?

There’s an enduring duality to life after loss. “Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything,” C.S. Lewis observed of his own grief.. For Jami, 15 years after Joe’s death, the happiness captured in that wedding photograph is present still, in the memory. But it is equally met with the sting of his absence.  

By the time of his death many of the people closest to my father had given up on him. He drank and took pills and it was often left to me to pick him up and put him to bed at the end of the night. He would cry and apologize and promise me he would get it right. On the day he died I found him in the living room. He had fallen face first over the back of the couch. 

The first time I felt the need to understand the woman who had become my mother, I was watching her sob quietly through a sliver of a slightly opened door.