Chapter 1 — The Only Thing That Helped

I was twenty-nine years old, and still trying to find my way through the grief of losing my mother.

Grief, I had learned that year, is not a thing you get over.

It is a thing you learn to carry, and in the early months I did not carry it well; it sat on me like a stone, and the ordinary machinery of my life ground slowly to a halt beneath its weight.

Nothing helped.

Not the well-meaning advice, not the sympathy cards, not the passage of time that everyone promised would heal what did not feel healable.

And then, almost by accident, I found the one thing that made the pain feel as though it had some purpose.

I began volunteering at a hospital.

Specifically, I began spending time with the patients who had no one, the ones who were dying, at the ends of their lives, with no family beside them, no visitors, no hand to hold.

For almost a year, I sat with strangers through their final days, and I discovered that in comforting other people’s endings, I found some quiet comfort for my own loss, as though the love I could no longer give my mother could be spent, instead, on these forgotten souls who needed it just as much.

It did not fix my grief.

But it gave it somewhere to go.

I have thought a great deal, since, about that phrase, somewhere to go, because it turned out to be the secret of everything that followed, though I did not understand it at the time.

Grief is love with nowhere to land.

That is what no one tells you when someone you love dies: that the love does not die with them, that it goes on existing, powerful and undiminished, but that the person it was meant for is gone, and so it has nowhere to go, and it turns, dammed up inside you, into pain.

That was what had been happening to me in the months after my mother died.

All the love I had for her, all the care and attention and tenderness, was still there, with no one to receive it, and it had curdled, inside me, into the stone of grief that would not lift.