When she was finished, I watched the line of people around the couple grow. They were patted on the back. They were hugged. The medium hugged them, too. They were all sharing the human experience together as I watched from afar.

I left and checked out of my hotel early, certain I could not stay a minute more.

As I headed out of town and back toward Los Angeles, I thought about how my trips to the desert had become more frequent in the last several years, partly because I was hoping to find some kind of peace in it, but also because it felt like the miraculous was possible in places where no one else was around. As the vast expanse of parched land whizzed by me, I kept wondering why I was so intent on trying to pre-grieve. Why I thought it would work.

Was I also trying to pre-grieve the inevitability of Bobby’s pairing with someone he would eventually move on to in a more permanent way—building a life with a new person in ways we could not? This included having children, of course.

As I drove, I was drawn to signs for a mission on a reservation. On the dusty road, I paused beside a cemetery hemmed in by rusted wire fencing, its crosses facing the mission in the distance. The sun had bleached most of the silk flowers and frayed ribbons that lined the sand-pooled graves. I drove on, and the bright white of the Spanish mission came into view. It was ornate in a way that felt out of place among squat trailers and desert-rough trucks. The parking lot was lined with vendors selling Indian fry bread, and the smell of hot cooking oil settled over everything. The license plates showed people had come from all over the country to look at the aging frescoes, and touch the saint partially enclosed in glass. They wanted to light gift-shop candles and adorn the church with them, let them flicker among the dozens of people kneeling and asking for something, too. I lit one and asked for the same things I had always asked for: to no longer be afraid, to have my grandparents watch over us, especially my mother and father, who needed protection more than I did.