I took his old pencil case out of his desk, the day he got too sick to fix. It’s a tartan fabric, flat and long, with holes in all four corners. It’s got leather alongside the zipper. I’m not sure I meant to bring it back to Brooklyn, but then I did. There’s a dime in there, it’s from 1941, and it’s got Hermes on it instead of Kennedy, obviously.

I think he’s had it most of my life, the pencil case, since I remember the privilege of borrowing it when I was young. But I’m sitting at our coffee table looking at it, and I realize I don’t know where he got it. My mom might know, most likely, because not all the questions I have are unanswerable, but I can’t ask him.

I think about how I felt the day he died; fragile but full of light and grace, full of unrealized sorrow, and so hyperaware of all the love around me. I felt so lucky to have known him.

And now I feel so bereft, so heavy, so unable to ask him questions about the pencil case, or whether there’s a maximum I can contribute to my IRA this year, or whether we did alright with his funeral. I don’t know that I want that lightness back, now that the sorrow has arrived, because I know I have to go through this, I have to put my head down and get through it. I just keep thinking how upset he would get when I cried about anything, and now he’s not here to tell me not to cry because everything is going to be fine, even if it will be.

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