The Empty Bowl at 6 A.M.

The first week after he died, I kept waking at six. Not because of an alarm — because for eleven years, six was the hour a cold nose found my hand.

I would get up, walk to the kitchen, and reach for his bowl before I remembered. Then I would stand there in the blue light, holding an empty bowl, not knowing what to do with my hands.

A friend told me to put the bowl away. I could not. Instead I started filling it with water every morning and setting it on the windowsill, where the sun makes a small moving circle. It is not a memorial, exactly. It is more like keeping a seat at the table.

Grief, I am learning, is not a problem to solve. It is a routine that has nowhere to go. So I give it somewhere to go: one bowl, one quiet minute, one small act of continuing to care.