She was not a morning person.
This was known. Established. Documented in ways both gentle and forensic. She was, as Kieran had once put it with great diplomatic care, *pre-verbal before nine.*
He had adapted. He always had coffee made. He didn’t ask questions until the second cup. He learned to read her half-awake signals — the small ones that said *I need quiet* versus the ones that said *I need company*.
This morning she came down still mostly asleep, sat at the table, and put her head down on her arms.
He put coffee beside her and went back to his side of the kitchen.
After a few minutes she said, muffled by her own arms: “I had a dream about my dad.”
He didn’t say anything, just came and sat beside her.
“It was a good dream,” she said. “That’s almost worse.”
He put a hand on her back. Didn’t rub it or pat it or do anything with it, just rested it there — warm and present, like a hand on a door to let you know someone’s on the other side.
Her father had been gone for three years. She still dreamed about him regularly and it still caught her off guard each time.
“He would have liked you,” she said, after a while.
“Yeah?”
“He liked people who didn’t crowd him.”
Kieran smiled. “High praise.”
Grief, she’d learned, doesn’t diminish. It just finds a way to coexist with the ordinary morning, with the coffee getting cold, with the hand on your back that doesn’t need to fix anything to help.
“Okay,” she said, and sat up. “I’m okay.”
“I know,” he said, and meant it.
✦ Today’s Reflection
How does your partner show up for you when you’re carrying something heavy — and have you told them what that kind of presence means?
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Sonia M. Rompoti, MSc, Bsc 
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