There is a particular cruelty to the alarm clock that has nothing to do with the hour it sounds. It is the cruelty of interrupted narrative — we are always, upon waking, pulled from the middle of something. I spent years believing that discipline meant training yourself not to mind. I was wrong about that, as I was wrong about most things I believed before the age of thirty.

What I have learned since is less portable, harder to fit into advice. Grief does not move in stages; it moves the way water moves through limestone, finding channels you didn't know were there, surfacing in rooms you thought were dry. My mother understood this. She never told me time heals. She said, "You will become a person for whom this has happened," which is a different thing entirely. I did not appreciate the precision of that language until long after she was gone, which is, I suppose, exactly her point.