Ezra and Emily met up with Ezra’s parents in the bar at the Gregory on the Park.

“Oh, honey,” Ezra’s mom whispered, when she hugged her. “How are you doing? You know, it happened to me, too, a few years after Ezra was born.”

“I’m okay,” Emily answered, in a way that made her mother-in-law hug her harder.

“I’m always here for you,” she whispered, her voice teary. “Please. Call whenever you want to talk.”

“Thank you,” Emily said, knowing that saying any more might bring her to tears, too, and she didn’t want to risk it. But she did want to talk to her mother-in-law, ask her how long it took her until she stopped crying, if it was different if you already had a healthy child, different if you were older when it happened, knowing you didn’t have much time left. Those would be questions for another time, though, if she ever had the courage to ask them.

Ezra’s dad gave her a tight hug but didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. Emily could tell what he wanted to say through the strength of his arms. This was a loss for them, too.

Both of Ezra’s parents were doctors. The first time the four of them went out to dinner after Emily and Ezra’s wedding, a woman came over to the table and said, “Dr. Gold!” And all four of them looked up. The woman had meant Ezra’s mom, who, before she retired, was the chief of breast imaging at Princeton Medical Center. The woman was ten years cancer-free, after Ezra’s mom diagnosed a malignancy. Dr. Gold had gotten up from the table and hugged the woman.

“It makes all the training, all the long hours worth it when something like that happens,” she said, when she sat back down.

Ezra’s father was an ophthalmologist. He’d said his favorite part of the profession was when he got to fit someone for glasses the first time, and all of a sudden the world sharpened for them and they could see everything differently.

In Ezra’s parents, Emily could see the seeds of his passion, his empathy, his need to make the world better, even if it was for just one person, one family, one child. But she could also see the high standards he held himself to, the self-sacrifice, the need to appear fine, even when he wasn’t.

Emily remembered the second or third time she’d gone with Ezra to visit his parents in New Jersey. He’d knocked over a wineglass that had shattered on their terra-cotta floor. He’d apologized over and over until his father said, “We don’t dwell on failures, Ez. We acknowledge, we vow to do better, and we move on.”