What Yvonne manages to do, in the days after Brians diagnosis and in the days after Brians death, is to locate herself exactly where all the guide-to-grief people say she should be. At home, by herself, with her daughters or with friends, she lets herself be a mother awash in grief. We have one brief phone call in which she weeps to me that she just wanted more of him, and I feel so much the same way that instead of comforting her, as I intended, I just weep with her and then we mumble our goodbyes into our wet phones. With us, and then later with me, she doesnt center her grief. Shes careful not to cry first or loudest and she rarely refers to her own loss. She is, as Brian says, a fucking class act.

In Love by Amy Bloom