Children who grow up inside love can still carry inherited absences.
On Mother’s Day in kindergarten, Theodore came home with three paper flowers because he could not decide whether to give one to Dorothy, one to “heaven,” and one to Doctor Prescott because “she helps baby people.”
Margot got in trouble for correcting another child who said mothers were only the women who gave birth.
“That’s not enough by itself,” she informed the class.
Bridget wrote an entire page titled Things My Mother Would Probably Like Based on Available Evidence.
Dorothy kept that page in the cedar box too.
As the years passed, the shape of grief changed again.
It stopped being a wound that reopened every morning and became instead a room always present in the house of Dorothy’s life. Some days she walked through it. Some days she merely knew it was there behind a closed door. Certain sounds opened it instantly—Colleen’s favorite song in the grocery store, the smell of lemon oil on wood, the sight of purple markers in a school supply aisle.
But there was joy too. Real joy.
Margot’s first lead in the school play.