One way you realize you’re healing: For a while, what you’ve suffered is the biggest thing you can imagine. In your pain and suffering, you twist reality around your own wound and you see the whole world through the lens of your pain. For a time, what you’re facing really is the biggest, ugliest, cruelest thing that anyone could ever be allowed to experience. And then over time, as you fight to heal, as you move forward, one foot in front of the other over and over again, you begin once again to see other people’s losses as weighty and real—as real, even, as what you’ve lost.

