I couldn’t help but believe ever more firmly that who we were resided in all we had lost, that the disappearance of home and family, this gaping hole left by Papa and the others, gave shape and weight to our persons, as air to balloons, so that we hovered and drifted, light-headed with grief, anchored to solid ground only by a flimsy thread of self-knowledge—this faint notion that once we had been more, that there had been more to ourselves besides loss.
