I couldn't even find your name under the Social Security death list, although I found your father's. Maybe SSI doesn't count; you would have to had entered a golden retirement before you get even your name and day of death on the web. And none of the search engines turned up a sign of you anywhere else, anywhere. That clapper on the bell curve, arcing below where a strike would make a sound.

I am grateful for those months of beauty and brittleness, for the silver and the brass beneath. Even if you hadn't lost what we were then, you still would have lost it by now, as the rest of us did more slowly, guarding our smaller stock of dreams. But I wish we could sit together sometimes on the bare stones of this slow and muted afterlife, because I do not believe we shall have any other to share.

There is no greater truth than loss.