A friend at the shiva tonight told me something he was told when he was sitting shiva for his father, who died not long ago.

"He told me I was going to be alright but that the hardest thing will be the firsts. The first birthday, the first holidays, the first…"

"New Yorker," I said.

My friend laughed.

On Wednesday I stared at the table-of-contents of this week’s New Yorker Magazine and realized that it was probably one of the first New Yorker’s in the last, say, forty years (at least) that wasn’t perused by my father.

The thought gave me a chill. The idea that life goes on after the death of a loved one is hard to take at a time like this.

The fact that the Talk of the Town and the listings will continue on after my father—a man who studied the New Yorker’s listings closely for theater, music, and art he wanted to see—is gone was, for a moment, deeply, painfully sad.

This was the first funeral my friend has attended since his father’s funeral and that was hard for him. But as he stood out on the roof deck of my father’s apartment building staring at the Tribute in Light, which sent two beams of light into the blue night sky he said, "This is a miracle, isn’t it? This view."