But honestly, I’m not. When I let her talk, she’ll talk. But when I want a straight answer, she’s more evasive.

Like it only hurts this much because he was so great.”

checking him out, that’s not all that surprising.

think there’s so much out of our control. Almost everything about how our lives go. But I think deciding that we’re all just on a track, that we never really had any say over our own decisions—it feels like the kind of thing someone with a lot of regrets would need to be true. Maybe I need something different to be true.”

Maybe truth is less about a compromise of conflicting viewpoints and more about an integration of them.

“For the one you love? Anything. You unmake the world and build a new one. You do anything to give them what they need.”

When you come from a family like mine, you’re a part of a whole, like one square in a quilt. Anytime you try to pull in a particular direction, there are hundreds of other squares to resist. To pull you back.”

“If you’ve got something to say,” I reply, “I’d love for you to interrupt me.”

She taught me to think of life not just in terms of how many executioner’s blades were poised over our proverbial necks at any given time but in terms of how we could use our time before that ax fell, or didn’t. And a lot of the time it didn’t. Keep working, keep moving, keep hoping.