Even though my grandmother never went to school, she remembered a poem she had learned as a child:
"I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;"
When she named me Madeline, it was the most cultured name she could think of, a name that she felt carried a sense of grace and beauty. I may not remember much from my early life, but her loving care filled in the gaps. She told me that when she found me, I was badly injured, lying by the roadside, barely alive. She always regretted that after all these years, she hadn’t been able to find any information about my birth family.
I was deeply sad when my grandmother passed away, but the grief seemed to be trapped inside me, and not a single tear came out. After taking care of her affairs, I went back to school. I avoided speaking and interacting with others, and life suddenly felt dull.