My name is Margaret, and I am sixty-three years old. Last month, I boarded a plane bound for Montana to bury my son. Grief does strange things to time—it stretches minutes into hours and collapses years into a single breath. Sitting in that narrow airplane seat beside my husband, Robert, I felt as though I were watching myself from somewhere far away, as if this were happening to another woman entirely. Robert sat stiffly, his hands resting on his knees, fingers moving over the fabric of his pants like he was trying to smooth out a wrinkle that didn’t exist. He had always been the fixer in our marriage—the man who tightened loose hinges, patched cracks in the walls, found solutions where others saw problems.

But that morning, there was nothing for him to fix. He hadn’t said my name once since we left the house. We had lost the same person, yet our grief moved on separate tracks, never quite touching, like parallel lines doomed never to meet. When he offered me water, his voice was gentle and distant, like he was afraid any louder sound might shatter what little composure we had left. I shook my head, my throat too tight to swallow even kindness. As the plane taxied forward and the engines roared, I closed my eyes and pressed my palms into my lap, grounding myself in the sensation of pressure and fabric and breath. For days, I had woken with my son’s name stuck in my throat, unspoken and aching. But this moment—this sealed metal tube rising into the sky—felt like the instant grief stopped pretending. Then the intercom crackled, and the pilot spoke. “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.