“Things get broken and lost and forgotten as we go through the world, things that we love, things we thought we couldn’t live without. You don’t need to fix everything. It’s not your job. And if we’re both a little broken because of the people we lost, so what? All we can do is keep going, Ishmael. The best thing we can hope for is not that we’re ‘fixed,’ but that we find people who understand the ways in which we’ve been broken. People who stand beside us anyway.’

We kneel on the new floor, holding the scraps and broken pieces of my father’s watch, and cry. It almost feels good to be crying with company, to be crying at home, in this familiar place.”