In Memoriam

Last week, while I was in the middle of rewriting a scene in which one of my characters falls to his death, my husband walked into my office, phone in hand, and said that he had just learned that one of his cousins fell from a ladder onto the marble floor of his bathroom and died. Life changes in the instant. How do you cope with something like that? How do you recover from it? Even though we went to a memorial for Alex’s cousin, even though we grieved for him, I still have not been able to accept his death as I did his life–which is to say, without question.