“That’s allowed too,” Patricia said kindly. “Grief doesn’t always require having known someone well. Sometimes it’s just grief for the years that could have existed and didn’t.”
My mother reached over and touched the edge of the photograph gently, almost reverently, as if she were finally allowed to acknowledge something she’d spent decades pretending didn’t exist.
“Thank you for keeping all of this,” she said to Patricia. “I know none of us had any right to ask for it, showing up the way we did.”
“Family has a way of showing up exactly when it’s ready to,” Patricia said. “I don’t think timing is something any of us really get to control.”
That observation stayed with my mother for weeks afterward, I think, in ways she didn’t fully articulate until much later.
One evening, sitting on our porch while Milo chased fireflies in
