This is it--what all the hoopla is about, what Wuthering Heights is about--it all boils down to this feeling rushing through me in this moment with Joe as our mouths refuse to part. Who knew all this time I was one kiss away from being Cathy and Juliet and Elizabeth Bennet and Lady Chatterley!?

The architecture of my sister's thinking, now phantom. I fall down stairs that are nothing but air.

When I'm with him, there is someone with me in my house of grief, someone who knows its architecture as I do, who can walk with me, from room to sorrowful room, making the whole rambling structure of wind and emptiness not quite as scary, as lonely as it was before.

How could a mother who boils water for pasta leave two little girls behind?

All her knowledge is gone now. Everything she ever learned, or heard, or saw. Her particular way of looking at Hamlet or daisies or thinking about love, all her private intricate thoughts, her inconsequential secret musings – they’re gone too. I heard this expression once: Each time someone dies, a library burns. I’m watching it burn right to the ground.

I'm layering away: sauce, noodles, I belong to you, cheese, sauce, my heart is yours, noodles, cheese, I hear your soul in your music, cheese, cheese, CHEESE.

Grief is forever. It doesn't go away; it becomes part of you, step for step, breath for breath.