Two Roads

I lost both my grandfather and my best friend in July. Zayde proved easier to mourn – there was family, a funeral, two thousand years of tradition to serve as my guide. The Mourners’ Kaddish. Y’itgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei rabah. But there was nothing I could read, no prayer I could sing, that would help me process what happened to Nathalie.

A week after we buried my grandfather, I volunteered to walk over to his office to dig up the documents my grandmother would need in order to sell it. This would be no small task – Zayde was the kind of messy genius who could multiply four hundred thirty eight by fifty seven in seconds but couldn’t keep a filing cabinet organized. It was something I could do to feel useful while my mother and grandmother grieved. It is one sadness to lose a grandparent, another entirely to lose a father or husband.

Before I left, I peeped into my mother’s room, which smelled like cough syrup and stale sleep. She hadn’t left her room much since the funeral, not even during the shiva when everyone gathered in the living room to eat bagels and cry into cream cheese. I tiptoed in, grabbed a couple of the half dozen water glasses that had accumulated on her nightstand, and snuck back to the kitchen to place them in the sink before I went out.

Walking into the Upper West Side summer morning was like walking into someone’s mouth. Even the ground in Central Park was spongey and moist beneath my feet, tongue-like. Sweat crawled down the back of my button-down and beneath my cutoff shorts. I had been trying to stay...