I will come back as a little breeze. You will feel me on your face, and you will know that I am still listening. So you can still talk to me.

I hadn't realized how much I'd been needing to meet someone I might be able to say everything to.

There are some things you never say good-bye to

But it seemed to me that this was the way we all lived: full to the brim with gratitude and joy one day, wrecked on the rocks the next. Finding the balance between the two was the art and the salvation.

Remember me in your dreams, as I will you.

The things that brought me the most comfort now were too small to list. Raspberries in cream. Sparrows with cocked heads. Shadows of bare limbs making for sidewalk filigrees. Roses past their prime with their petals loose about them. The shouts of children at play in the neighborhood, Ginger Rogers on the black-and-white screen.

No one wants to mother more vigilantly than a woman who is childless and wishes she wasn’t.