That picture has been on the wall beside me the whole time I have been writing this book. After the shock of first seeing it wore off, I came to love it very much, partly for the way it makes my loss visible and beautiful—it feels like the closest thing I have to a picture of my father at my wedding—but chiefly because, in a single image, it honors my joy together with my grief. That seems right to me. Life, too, goes by contraries: it is by turns crushing and restorative, busy and boring, awful and absurd and comic and uplifting. We can’t get away from this constant amalgamation of feeling,
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