Books like A Day Late and a Dollar Short

You’re not asking too much,“ he said. ”You were just asking the wrong person. Ask me instead.

There had been women since, lots of them, to fill the nights and the days. In the dozen years since her death, he had hardly ever been alone, not physically anyway, but he had never loved another woman either, nor did he want to. As far as he was concerned, loving was far too painful. At fifty-nine, Jack Watson had everything he had ever wanted: a business that seemed to do nothing but grow and crank out money.

I used to feel like i was on the top of the world. Then one day, i noticed that it felt like i was no longer on the top of the world. I was just floating around inside of it. And then eventually, it felt like the world was on top of me.

So many people these days, it seemed, believed that these things (personal fulfillment and self-esteem) could come only from work, not from parenting, and many people believed that having children had nothing to do with raising them.

Of course, Mary was only trying to be kind. I admit that it was more my fault that our friendship became strained. I never told her directly how much her gestures of sympathy offended me. So of course she couldn’t have known that I did not need someone to comfort me. I did not want to be coddled by casseroles. Kindness was compensation. Kindness was a reminder that my life had changed, was always changing, that people thought I should just accept all this and become strong or brave, more enlightened, more peaceful. I wanted nothing to do with that. Instead, I wanted to live my life with the same focus as most people—to worry about my children’s education, but not whether I would be around to see them graduate, to rejoice that I had lost five pounds, and not be fearful that my muscle mass was eroding away.

Sometimes it’s exhausting for me to simply walk into the house. I try and calm myself, remember that I’ve lived alone before. Sleeping by myself didn’t kill me then and will not kill me now. But this what loss has taught me of love. Our house isn’t simply empty, our home has been emptied. Love makes a place in your life, it makes a place for itself in your bed. Invisibly, it makes a place in your body, rerouting all your blood vessels, throbbing right alongside your heart. When it’s gone, nothing is whole again.