Grief shared, I think, can produce two outcomes. Either you bind yourselves together and hold on for dear life, or you let go and up goes a wall too high to be crossed.

Terrible accidents happen all the time to many, many people. The grief that must fill the world is incomprehensible. Our small dose felt as large as the sun, didn’t it? And it persists.

How can I put this without sounding like an airless girl?

I was learning what vastness is found in the hearts of men.

If I didn’t feel as much to begin with, then it wouldn’t come as hard when, not if, but WHEN my fears came to pass again.

Grief (the biggest grief in the world) is like—What? What is it that happens to a person? I’ve always felt it is like a scream living inside me. It’s gotten a bit softer over time, but it’s never gone. I walk around the house or dig in the garden or wander the grocery store or sit at my desk and there’s a screaming inside my head like an air horn that warns of war.

I have found it to be absolutely astounding, all the trouble living has turned out to be.

I told my daughter recently that my grief has been an unbearable noise in my head for decades, and yet now, finally, I have written this letter to you and I’m surprised to find it is finally quiet.

I guess there’s no bottom to a person, but I feel you have left fewer stones unturned than anyone else who’s ever passed through, and it’s taken me some time to recognize how knowing you has been like coming in from the cold, lonely road to find a warm fire and a table laid...

We are thirty in our hearts, before all the disappointment, all the ways it turned out to be so much more painful than we thought it would be, but then again, it has also been magic.

I know that, even if I wrote a letter a thousand miles long it would not be able express the universe of the human soul...