Amy Butcher describes the experience of mourning a person she barely knew. An excerpt from Butcher’s memoir-in-progress:

“This is what happens now. I feel sadness about everything. I have no idea, of course, what Emily did or did not see, because of course I have no reason to mourn a woman I barely knew.

“‘It’s not like you were friends,’ someone told me once. ‘So it’s scary, sure—that proximity—but you don’t have a claim in all this sadness.’

“As if sadness is an entity one seeks desperately to call one’s own.”