At a small Chicago clinic, an Alaska nurse called about my daughter and said, “Your son-in-law hasn’t been here.” I booked the first flight north without crying, and by dawn, his Bahamas honeymoon was no longer the worst thing I’d found. – News

tired over the phone.

Of course I do.

That is what mothers do with loss. We retrofit guilt onto randomness because guilt feels active and grief feels useless.

But age has also taught me this:

Cruel people do not merely harm their victims. They train them. They teach them how to shrink, how to apologize, how to protect the very hand pressing them down.

Emily continue reading …