Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.

Placing love before birth and after death is a way of saying it is not simply an event inside a biography. It stands as the condition that makes a life legible at all, the thing that was there before you arrived and remains in circulation after you go. Whether you hear that as spiritual or as plainly factual, the observation holds: the affection you received predates you and the affection you give outlasts you.

For anybody grieving, that is not a consolation prize. What was given did not stop existing when the person died, and it goes on doing work in whoever received it. Notice this week where you are carrying something that came from somebody no longer here.