After the loss, I spent hours beside the window, watching daylight move through a world that seemed unchanged. Other people offered words, but I struggled to take them in. Leaving the hospital the following day, I felt mostly empty. Then an elderly woman paused beside me, spoke gently, and gave me a small symbolic item. She asked for nothing. In that brief encounter, I felt no pressure to explain myself or appear stronger than I was.
I kept her gift through the weeks that followed, as sorrow shifted between overwhelming
