There is a question I carry with me, the way you carry a stone in your pocket, turning it over, feeling its heft. Why did I choose to stand at the edge where life surrenders itself? Life is so beautiful. Devastatingly so. And yet three people, not bound to me by the ordinary ties of kinship, but connected nonetheless through the gravity of their stories, have crossed over. And each time, I am taken aback. Taken all the way back to ground zero. To prima materia. To that place before naming, before the small, careful ways we have learned to live.