In Santa Fe just last weekend for a visit with friends, my husband and I are lucky enough to have it all: sweet October warmth, blue sky, the coziness of all that adobe and the golden cascade of leaves coming down like coins as we stroll along.

Not far from downtown, we walk under an enormous pear tree, half the fruit still on and the other half a redolent carpet on the ground. We hear church bells from the cathedral, a brass band on the plaza. We have this delicious feeling of having extended our fall in the most seamless way possible: by simply driving south a few hours. Could we chase autumn’s glory all around the world? It feels like it.

At dusk, the New Mexico sky’s pinks lick their way across the firmament and then lower into embers on the horizon line. I feel a cotton candy vibe here, a coffee shop, cinnamon-chocolate, and chile vibe, a vibe topped off and sealed in by all the Day of the Dead skulls in shop windows on every corner.

What a beautiful moment in time, I think, remembering certain late Octobers in the San Juans over the course of all these years, leaves already gone, gray settling in in a way that said, “Hunker down, my brethren, hunker down.” In this moment, there is no need for hunkering. Instead, we loosen, having stolen a moment, a moment far from the snow that’s about to fall any second back home, up north.

Somewhere in our weekend conversational stream, there is mention of a book, a collection of essays about new business models and reasons for their success, called “The Culture Code.” Our friend Zach mentions the profile of a restaurant in New York where service itself has been reinvented and I casually pipe in that it sounds like a memorable meal I had with my daughter in the city once. I say the restaurateur’s name, and he points at me and excitedly says, “That’s it! That’s the one!” With corroboration, the book comes to life for him — and in the same synchronistic crackle, that meal vividly comes back to life for me.

It was an important meal. We had just dispatched ourselves to New York after the death of my husband in 2011. Her father. We had held it together for the memorial service, and then for her graduation from high school. She was about to turn 18, and going back to the city to visit close friends felt like the only thing we could possibly do.

Though we didn’t know it at the time, we were handling death in the only way we could — by compartmentalizing and walking away. Soldiering on. We had not yet come to terms with the smallest things (the closets full of clothes, the piles of skis), the medium things (the pads of paper with his writing on them, the stories of things he did that we never knew about) or the bigger things (figuring out what to do with the chair he sat in, seeing his truck go by with someone else in the driver’s seat). Let alone, the biggest thing of all — the idea of life continuing without a loved one’s body filling up its normal space in the world.

In New York, everything is different. We shoot ahead to spring in full bloom, bypassing the mountain mud season. We decide to go out for this five-course lunch at a well-known restaurant, because she, like her father, is interested in food and it seems right. We get to Eleven Madison Park (owned by restaurateur Danny Meyer, at the time) ready to be bowled over by the wonders of gastronomy. But after the meal, we’re surprised by our feelings. Because even though the food is really good, it’s the service that is unforgettable, and for one reason alone: its genuine, impeccable graciousness and kindness. They treat her like a queen. Make us both feel not only cared for, but loved. In the cutthroat world of restaurants? Unheard of.

Maybe we needed just this kind of unprecedented and surprise kindness more than we could fathom. I know it left a mark on me — the first tiny pinhole of an opening for feeling and vulnerability to seep into. For light to penetrate, tiny bit by tiny bit.

I explain the unique quality of the service to Zach without going into detail. But then later, back on the streets of Santa Fe, I take another look at all the bright candy skulls and skeletons looking at me from every window, the faces and remains of ancestors and people we’ve lost, smiling, all shaky and vibrant, and I get it, I get it in a way I’ve never gotten it before. Why we have to celebrate and hold close all those who have departed — feel them in our bones, and let it all, the whole beautiful mess, rattle around in broad daylight.