Since losing his wife and kids, he’d been expecting that they would somehow reveal themselves. At the seaside, in the woods, up in the high alpine, he searched for a sign. Fishing a river, he waited for his kids to come out of the water. He imagined returning home from work to flowers on the table, or to a light mysteriously turned on. “This was a dream, a hope, and a desire, and because it never happened it caused me incredible grief,” he told me recently.