“What does this loss mean to you?” Had I been asked or asked myself that question, I might have cited a scene from the novel How Should a Person Be?, when two characters who are best friends are repairing their relationship. In the book, Margaux tells Sheila, “Well, it’s like in life—you have the variables and you have the invariables, and you want to use them all, but you work around the invariables. I thought you were an invariable—and then you left without saying a word.” Sheila thinks, “Very deep inside, something began to vibrate. I was an invariable. An invariable. No word had ever
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