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Living with sadness, accepting it, is easier than trying to pretend it isn’t there. It is another of life’s great mysteries that sadness and joy can coexist so compatibly with one another.

Unmet expectations have a clever way of showing up at every stage of life.

If he could not feel her breath, he could at least be where she most recently breathed.

He looked into my eyes in a way that rearranged my soul. I had forgotten how good it felt to be seen by him.

The hurt in my gut clamped down unbearably. I told myself I could only cry for one minute; that was all Mama made way for. One minute of sorrow and back to a straight face, a stiff back, and work. But that one minute of sadness melted into ten minutes, and before I knew it, I had cooled off the water with my steady stream of grief.

My lips trembled, and tears clouded my eyes. I pulled Essex to my chest and squeezed my love into him. I tried memorising everything: the curve of his back, the way his stubble felt when he brushed it across my cheek, the hardness of his muscles, his calloused hands.

“Member now, even in the big house you’s still Pheby Delores Brown, born on Christmas Day. You the gran-daudder of Vinnie Brown, who was the gran-daudder of a Mandara queen. You a slave in name, but never in your mind, chile.”

I had yet to learn that nothing in this world can ever match the marvels that we conjure up in our own minds.

Even a fool could have a soul whose torments were a constant source of amazement. Why are we so slow to see this, and why do we assume that it is the easiest thing in the world to know and judge another? Why, when we are reluctant even to describe a wedge of cheese we are seeing for the first time, do we draw our final conclusions from our first encounters with people, and happily dismiss them?

Even a fool could have a soul whose torments were a constant source of amazement. Why are we so slow to see this, and why do we assume that it is the easiest thing in the world to know and judge another? Why, when we are reluctant even to describe a wedge of cheese we are seeing for the first time, do we draw our final conclusions from our first encounters with people, and happily dismiss them?

On an evening, visit some dwelling, sit in a room with a human mother as she puts her child to sleep, and listen to the song she makes to quiet her child.

It was a mistake. You were playing with something you didn’t understand.

Their interior states are written across their faces, in their gesture and posture. Fear and anger, delight and despair. The jolt of surprise or unexpected pain. The flush of humiliation. The new, outer layers of their brains struggle to conceal these expressions. Or to fake them convincingly.

Oh, here’s something. Humans can be fantastically cruel. To one another, and to other creatures. Once they gain any power over their fellows, they cling to it ruthlessly.

Occasionally, when I saw the curiously active drowsing into which he increasingly fell, it occurred to me that he was dying because something in him resolutely lived.

And it occurs to me now that perhaps she was really calloused, as I’ve so often said, since callus will form in soft places that have too often been rubbed sore.

I imagined it still containing particles dislodged through time from David’s life, and the lives of his wife and his son: of birthday cake, antiseptic cream, Avon perfume, French cheese tentatively chosen for special occasions, ink pressed through the pages of Robert’s homework, the sweet German wine David only ever bought at Christmas — all of it present and persisting, constituent parts of that afternoon.

It was not unusual to hear cancer patients say, as they adjusted their silk turbans or their soft knitted hats, that the disease had brought them closer than ever to their loved ones, and given them a precious perspective on life.

I imagined that I’d live, then I would die, my death a brief stop at the end of my sentence. Now I understand that death has a duration and an amplitude, with events as various and strange as those of a life. I’ve fixed on that dreary afternoon by the market square, and think of him now in these terms: that he lived for 77 years, and he died for 48 days.

What do you suppose is hidden inside that soft frame of flesh, those twigs of white bone?