I thought I knew grief. But I don’t.

I had had a child within me die before being born. And I felt the knife-like cutting loss of hope.

My mother died at 90; my father, who never recovered from her death, at 93. My sisters and I cared for him in the years between their deaths, which gave grief a time to settle so we could carry on. I still mourn their loss but the memories of love and joy are stronger than the abyss of death.

My husband’s death on Oct. 4 crushed my core. We had been together for half a century. He knew me in the biblical sense and in the intellectual sense. He was essential to me in practical ways — who will remove the tick I felt embedded in the back of my neck this morning? — and in much deeper ways.

I think of it like the phantom limb that someone who has lost an arm or leg sees isn’t there and knows is gone but still feels its presence.

The term was coined by the Philadelphia neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell who treated wounded Civil War soldiers. Dr. Mitchell wrote, “Nearly every man who loses limb carries about with him constant or inconstant phantom of the missing member, sensory ghost of that much of himself, and sometimes most inconvenient presence, faintly felt at times, but ready to be called up to his perception by blow, touch, or change of wind.”

Five days after Gary’s death, I still, without thinking, put the sports section at his place when I bring in the morning paper. I get out his tea mug when I turn on the kettle. And so the day goes.

I thought I knew cancer. But I don’t.

My grandmother died of breast cancer when I was young. I visited her with my family in the hospital. My beloved only aunt died of ovarian cancer — bravely pursuing life with verve until she died.

I had endometrial cancer and, with my uterus removed, lived my life as I always had.

I thought I would follow the same course with Gary. We traveled to Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City with our daughter Saranac just as we had for my cancer. But there was no simple surgical solution. Gary’s cancer had progressed too far.

I’d known for months something was wrong. He was constantly tired and had lost 50 pounds, a skeleton of his former robust self.

As cancer was consuming his body and his vital energy was drained, autocracy was consuming the life force of our democracy and the body politic was failing. These were dark days for us. I felt great despair.

Still, Gary hoped the treatment would give him some more time. We had scheduled his first session of chemo and immunotherapy for Oct. 6 and booked a hotel room near Memorial Sloan Kettering for Sunday.

On Saturday, when he didn’t return home from erranding, I started calling hospitals. He wasn’t there. The woman who answered at the fourth hospital I called said I should call the police.

I did.

A short time later, I got a call from the Guilderland Police, asking about Gary’s medication. He was off the road a mile from our home.

I grabbed his medications and drove to the scene — flashing lights in the dark of night. I was told Gary was “not responsive” — dead — but I insisted I see for myself.

“I need to see my husband,” I said.

The police officers hesitated, saying there was a lot of blood. I pushed. They said I could see him if I didn’t touch him. They pulled back the blanket covering his face.

“I love you,” I told him.

The week before, as he was headed to the O.R. for a bronchoscopy, I’d said the same words. He replied, “And I, you.”

This time, there was no response. Just silence. I felt utterly alone.

What I’ve learned since then is that people can be extraordinarily kind. While I continue to worry about the state of our democracy, I can see that, in the moments that count, people you don’t even know will help you.

I have no idea of the political beliefs of the people, many of them nameless, who have helped me since Gary’s death but their responses, the way they did their jobs, have solidified my belief in the good of humanity.

The tow-truck driver the police called brought Gary’s car right to our driveway and did not charge me.

On the scene that night, a Guilderland paramedic told me he thought Gary’s death had been a quick one. I clung to those words until I heard from the coroner on Monday that the autopsy had shown his cancer had eaten into his pulmonary artery.

He had drowned in his own blood but would have been unconscious in less than a minute.

When Saranac and I went to the car wash in Voorheesville, where a customer there kindly showed us how to use the equipment, we kept repeating “less than a minute” as we scrubbed and scrubbed inside the car.

When my daughter, Magdalena and her daughter, Dove, and I walked to the place where he had died, we thanked the woman who lived across the street, who had called the police about the car that had sat there for hours.

The director at the funeral home in Altamont honored our request to see Gary before his body was cremated. We thought he would be on a slab in the cellar. Instead, the director had laid his body in a cardboard case in the funeral home parlor where we could see just his face so even his 4-year-old granddaughter could say her goodbyes.

We also wanted to escort his body to the crematorium so we followed the hearse to a grand old cemetery where we had never been before, Oakwood.

Saranac and I clutched each other as Gary’s body was eased into the furnace. When we learned the cremation would take hours, the man in charge of the process, Todd Jackson, opened the massive Romanesque chapel for us. As we sat on the carved oak pews, he told us his story and the chapel’s story too.

Jackson had grown up in Watervliet and, as a boy, roamed the nearby cemetery. An artist who also sculpts, he knows every corner of the place. His two sons now work with him.

The chapel was built by the parents of Gardner Earl. He was the only son of a wealthy Troy collar maker and had been sickly as a child, Jackson said. Gardner filled his youthful life with reading books from Europe and traveled there as a young man, where he learned about cremation.

When he died at age 37, his parents cremated his body and built the chapel with a crematorium.

Hearing this story made me realize the loss all around me. Gardner Earl’s parents had turned their grief into something tangible for others to benefit from.

I determined to do the same. Our newspaper came out on time last week. In addition to Gary’s obituary, it carried six others. The Enterprise publishes obituaries free of charge because we believe every life is important.

But now I am reading those obituaries with new eyes, seeing how, in each person’s death, others are suffering just as I am. With each person’s death, an entire world has ended.

Gary, who loved Mark Twain, chose the quotation that was printed on our wedding invitation those many decades ago. “Grief can take care of itself,” Twain wrote, “but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.”

I had years of sharing joy with Gary Spencer and I hope to use my grief to take care of others as I have been cared for.

— Melissa Hale-Spencer, editor