The silence after the last breath

I’ve been folding a man’s coat today—soft wool, one sleeve slightly too long. Not because it needs mending, but because the way it hangs tells me something about who he was when he still wore it. The air in the room feels different now, not empty, but full of the weight of what wasn’t said. I keep thinking about how much of a person lives in the small things they never meant to leave behind—the crease where a hand rested on a table, the way a shoe leans just so. It’s not grief. It’s attention.