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would feel better soon. They, too, had assumed they would be married to one person for the rest of their lives—and suddenly had had that person yanked away forever.
    The only time Gert felt unburdened was when she was in the group. Normally she struggled under the weight of knowing that if she bumped into someone and had to explain that her husband had died, it’d be an uphill battle to deal with their awkward responses, to make them understand how she felt and all of the challenges she faced. The women in the group just knew.
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    â€œWhere were you when Erika said this?” asked Brenda, a heavyset thirty-five-year-old nurse. Brenda, who had the voice of an evangelist, had become the group’s de facto leader. Their group had been started by a social worker from a local hospital, but the social worker eventually had found they were able to run it on their own.
    â€œWe were staying at Hallie’s apartment Friday night,” Gert said. “Hallie was my roommate in college. Erika is her friend from high school. Anyway, Hallie was in the bathroom brushing her teeth, and Erika and I were smoothing out our blankets on the floor, and Erika got serious. She turned to me and said, ‘I know you think no one understands what you’re going through. But every day when I wake up, I still want to say hi to Ben. He was in my life for so long, and then he was gone. I love him and I never get to see him anymore. So believe me, I know how you feel.’” Gert paused to take a deep breath. “And I know she was trying to be helpful, but having your husbanddie in a car accident is not the same thing as breaking up with him because you weren’t sure you loved him and then he ends up with someone else. I wanted to tell her this—”
    She broke off.
    â€œBut you didn’t,” said Leslie, a short owl-eyed girl who had been married to a man thirty years older than she. Gert felt sorry for her, imagining she’d taken the first guy to be smitten with her—and then Gert felt bad for being judgmental.
    Brenda said to Gert, “You could have told her.”
    â€œBut she was only trying to help,” Gert said.
    Michele shook her head. She was thirty-four, a paralegal. “They all are,” she said. “But don’t you ever want to say, no, this is how it really feels? Losing your husband feels like nothing, dead, like you want to jump back into that week when you had him back, and all you can do is look back because there aren’t things to look ahead to anymore.”
    â€œI can’t say all that,” Gert said.
    â€œHoney, you need to let someone in,” Brenda said. “Don’t be afraid of being real with people.”
    If I was real with people, Gert thought, I’d lose all of them.
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    The other topics at the meeting were standard: How they’d gotten through special occasions, how they filled their free time, how they were managing their financial affairs. Marc hadn’t had any life insurance, except for the $1,000 policy he’d gotten—along with a free Discman—for signing up for a Sony Mastercard. Who would ever have thought to get life insurance for a twenty-seven-year-old? Marc’s parents, luckily, paid for the burial and for a year of the mortgage on the condo. Some of the women in the group had had to sell their homes.
    â€œThe problem with moving isn’t necessarily about money,” a woman named Arden said. “I can’t pack up his things. Some of them, I haven’t touched since he died.”
    Gert thought of the extra bedroom in the condo, the one Marc had used as a workroom. It held a computer, trophies going back to his high school soccer championships, even BoyScout patches. She had barely touched these things since he’d died. Sometimes she wandered into the room and stood there for a while, in a comfortable haze.
    â€œDon’t push yourself,” Brenda told Arden.