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The kids would come home from school and their mother would be on the couch, sometimes upright, sometimes not, depending on how the chemo was that week. She would ask each of them about the day. She wanted to know who had said what at lunch. She did this when she was so tired she could not stand without help, and she smiled at the answers, and it was almost an ordinary afternoon.

Her name was Gretchen, and she was my wife. She lived with breast cancer for 6 years. I have a lot of memories from those years. Those afternoons are the ones I keep coming back to.

We will all lose all we love.

After she died, the mornings turned into long walks. A six-mile loop through the Park Cities in Dallas: front door, down University, through the SMU campus, onto the Katy Trail, and back along Armstrong. The world was carrying on. On the loop I could move through it without being part of it.

The question came on the walks. Not the question people asked me. People asked, how are you. People asked, are you sleeping. The question was: how do you build a life after everything you built has been swept away.

I read what people read, and the question was still there when I closed the books. Wisdom may keep you safe, but it won't keep you warm. It would not sit beside me on the couch in the evening. It would not make a meal worth lingering over. I needed a wisdom for the table: a chair, bread, and room for grief and ordinary laughter in the same hour.

So I went back to a book I had read many times before, and I started reading it differently.

The book is Ecclesiastes, written more than 2,000 years ago by a writer who calls himself the Preacher. I'm a Christian, and for me it is a sacred book. But Ecclesiastes is one of the strangest books in the Bible, and the strangeness is what makes it portable. It says things that make a Christian reader uncomfortable and things that make a non-Christian reader sit up. You don't have to share my source to find what follows useful. It is for anyone who eats, works, loves, and will one day die.

What Ecclesiastes does is name the conditions of life so accurately that you stop arguing with them. Life is brief. The world goes on whether you do or not. Wisdom will help you, and wisdom will fail you. There is only one life, and you do not get to step outside it to check whether it is going well.

And then, in the middle of that hard honesty, the writer interrupts himself. He tells you to eat and drink. He tells you to be joyful and to do good while you live. “I commend joy,” he writes, “for man has nothing better under the sun but to eat and drink and be joyful” (Ecclesiastes 8:15).

Out of those passages came a framework. It is small, and the smallness is the point. When a life comes apart, the enormous answer is more than anyone can carry. But bread is not too heavy. A walk is not too heavy. A chair at a table, a small good task, an honest gift, the choice to face joy for one more day: these are small enough to pick up. They are also, the Preacher insists, large enough to live by. There is, he says, nothing better.