The deeper loss, the one that actually explained what had happened to my family, took longer to surface. I was staying, again, with the cousin whose jokes had followed me through my engagement decades earlier. Spontaneous visits to parents thin out, evenings with siblings grow rare, and cousins and old friends turn from daily companions into occasional guests. What I hadn’t predicted was what happened to my cousin’s family instead. Love didn’t shrink, but the mechanics of modern life changed how it gets lived out.