Not the way people on the outside like to do it.
They love to point fingers from behind a phone screen, like the whole thing is just a matter of bad hearts and bad choices.
It isn’t.
Most of us were exhausted.
Most of us cared too much, not too little.
Most of us had simply learned to speak in practical words because practical words are easier to survive than honest ones.
Honest ones stay with you when you try to sleep.
Practical ones let you finish your shift.
Still, once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.
And that made me dangerous in a small, ordinary kind of way.
Not dramatic.
Not heroic.
Just the kind of dangerous that starts asking questions people don’t have time for.
A few nights later, I was closing kennels with Dana, one of the techs who had been there longer than I had.
Dana was good at the work.
Fast hands. Clear eyes. No nonsense.
The kind of person who could bottle-feed newborn kittens while answering the phone and still remember which dog needed medication at six.
She saw me standing there rereading a cat card and said, “You’re doing that thing again.”
“What thing?”
“The thing where you look like you’re about to try to save the whole building with a clipboard.”
I laughed a little.
Then I said, “Do you ever think we call grief behavior because behavior sounds easier to treat?”
She kept stacking metal bowls.
“Sometimes grief is behavior.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“I know what you mean.”
She set the bowls down harder than she meant to.
Then she leaned against the counter and looked at me with the tired face of somebody who had cried over too many things in private.
“You want the truth?”
