The tenderness felt fragile. I found myself thinking in tiptoe, not wanting to frighten it or roar it away. The feeling wrapped around all of us there in that house. In the end, I was glad this had somehow found us, washed over us, taken away some of the shadow stuff in its tide as it washed out and away in the days after he was gone. But still, the shadows were there, the sadness. The sadnesses.
