At group, the faces in the circle revolved like diners at a bistro, survivors drawn by a deeper hunger to understand the senseless. She practised opening up, sharing, and receiving. With the other survivors, among the safety net of hands that caught her when she was sinking, she learned how to speak openly about things long shamed.

They talked about the physical and psychological ravages of grief. The weighty guilt and fiery anger that were often at the heart of a suicide survivor’s grief. They talked about triggers, how to recognize them, how to manage them. They talked about the ripple effects of suicide, the collateral damage. They talked about ways of coping with all these challenges, ways of surviving them. They talked about the slow and steady path back to living. Little by little, Kavita honoured her promise to herself. She was finding a better way.

In the circle, it was true that she encountered the nightmarish, at the centre of the pit where it was tossed, where it churned and settled, and later, got swept away by the janitor. But that wasn’t all. Around the circle, within the brick of people that made its protective wall, she discovered resilience, as primal and resolute as spring, as inured as ancient forces of resurrection. At last, in the church basement, she found a place to belong, and to believe, again.

At home, the distance between herself and Nirav expanded, as if every breath that should have been used for talking went to filling a balloon that was slowly pushing them apart, and on the verge of bursting with things unsaid. The closer she drew to her grief, the further apart they drifted. He started working late almost every night. When they were together, they spent most of their time either in separate rooms or watching television. It seemed like they had wordlessly decided if they wouldn’t talk about what needed to be said, then there was no point in talking at all.

When alone, she studied the little book of verses Hawthorn had loaned her, letting its wisdom seep into her core, into that quiet place she had discovered inside, that dwelling of truth and self. Somehow, the words felt familiar, as if the small, still voice were narrating them, as if they already belonged to her, but she had misplaced them.

Words such as: You grieve for those beyond grief. And you speak words of insight. But learned men do not grieve for the dead or the living.

And: Never have I not existed, nor you, nor these kings. And never in the future shall we cease to exist.

And: The self embodied in the body of every being is indestructible.

Indestructible.

She found herself visiting with Hawthorn’s inscription no less than the verses. The survivor wisdom he had learned himself, expressed in his own words, that she wished she could inscribe onto her insides, so she would always know them, too.