My husband’s parents had invited a revered pastor—or moksanim, in Korean—to participate in our wedding. “He’s known for his benedictions,” my husband said. I didn’t know someone could specialize in benedictions, the brief blessings given at the end of a service. I wondered what made his special. Was it the tone of his voice? The way he lifted his hands? His steady cadence? The pastor turned out to be a bespectacled Korean American man, in his late sixties, who had a fatherly warmth and a comforting authority. At the wedding, his blessing felt long, but mostly because I was impatient to walk back down the aisle to our recessional, the piano line in Coldplay’s “Clocks.” The blessing’s final words were “ . . . and may the grace of God and the love of God be with you both now and forevermore.” Forevermore isn’t a word you hear very often in everyday life. It’s High Church language. Forevermore turned out to be six years.

Suddenly, I was a young mother standing in the front pew of another church, listening to this same moksanim give a very different benediction. At thirty-three, my husband had died abruptly and tragically, drowning in Lake Geneva while touring as a rock cellist. Most of the wake was dreamlike for me, but I do remember that, before I received a line of hundreds of mourners carrying single roses, I noticed that pastor again, the one who gave great benedictions, up at the front of the church at the end of the service. I admit that I was relieved to see him there, open to whatever strength his words might offer. For many years after that, I hid out in the back pews at various churches. It was hard to be around smiling churchgoers who called themselves “blessed.” It felt like they were trying, through singing and sermons, to manufacture the starkness of our mortality, when it had become palpably real to me. After all, for almost a year a dead man’s clothes hung in my closet next to mine. His shoes, still in the shape of his feet, sat in our entryway.