Other therapists had their own names for it: death by mishap, inadvertent fatal impact, unintended loss of life. These were all very polite ways of describing what happens when one person, mistakenly and without malice, kills another.

Some things are like a long gone shooting pain. Some people are remembered like a flickering candle snapping in a faraway window. Some things are gone, but they just won't fade away. Some people are still alive only in lonely photographs,…