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We’ve just begun talking about bigger things. The Beatles came up recently and I showed you a video of John Lennon playing “Imagine.” I tried to explain why anyone would write a song about living in peace and why other people would call that person a dreamer and how sometimes people get shot for no good reason. You said, “How come they let people get guns?” and I said, “Exactly.”

When Obama won, Dad and I ran home from the neighborhood party and woke you up and took you downstairs to watch the speech at Grant Park, and I had to explain why so many people were crying and shaking their heads and saying they never thought a black man would be president even though you guys kept saying, “He’s brown.” The day after the election, some moms were talking in the school-yard about how California banned gay marriage and you asked me if that meant our friend Joann was divorced now and all the moms jumped in to
say no, and I added, “Someday, that’ll be fixed,” and I was mad at myself for not doing more to stop that from happening. I often feel like I’m not explaining things right to you, probably because half the time I don’t understand them myself. How can I explain why someone would weep because the new president is brown or protest because a woman married the woman she loved?

Dad and I talk over each other to tell you stories about teamwork or ingenuity or resolve—Venus and Serena Williams playing each other at Wimbledon, the anonymous men who made the Golden Gate Bridge and St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the Hoover Dam, Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea. I remember driving home one night under a full moon. You guys were in the way back arguing about which was larger, the sun or the moon, and after that was settled, Dad told you about Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong. “They were all the way up
there,” I said, tapping on the car window, hardly able to believe it, as proud as I would’ve been if I’d managed the mission myself. “They walked on
that moon right there
.”

Some of your questions have gone unanswered, or rather, too answered. When you asked why we only go to church when we’re with Greenie and Jammy, I must’ve started and stopped six times. As I stammered on about world religion and the gods people worship, Georgia, you wiggled out of bed, strapped on a pair of my high heels, and limped over to see yourself in the full-length mirror. Claire followed you, saying, “My turn, now it’s my turn!”

That night, I asked Dad if he considered himself a spiritual person and he surprised me by saying yes unequivocally.

“Really?” I said.

“You know when I feel spiritual?” he said. His
lips got all puffy, which for him is like falling to his knees and weeping. “When I’m with the girls.”

We were quiet after that, but I reached over and found his hand under the comforter and squeezed it. So much of our intuition and apprehension and belief about the world turns out to be impossible to communicate, but he had told me something big, something defining.

You are sacred to me too.

We wanted more kids. Well, I did and Dad was willing. But after my first year of breast cancer treatment, something popped up on my left ovary. It did not wax and wane, as cysts do. It just sat there. Then it started getting bigger, and Dad was adamant that my ovaries come out, regardless of the consequences.

It was a simple procedure that left me with four
tiny scars. And it was the worst thing that ever happened to me. All those periods and backaches and Midol, and then it was over, the most essential components of my reproductive system whisked away in a bio-waste bag.

A couple months later, we packed up all the baby stuff for our friend Teresa. The BabyBjörn, a handful of binkie leashes we’d clip to your onesies, the ladybug infant nail-clippers.

“You might as well take these too,” I said, handing her two mobiles. Teresa was so grateful as Dad carried the collapsed crib out to her car.

“Now we can turn that room into an office,” he said, as Teresa drove away with your infanthoods in her trunk.

“Great,” I said. “So we can stop raising babies and get back to work.”

Dad hugged me. Georgia, you saw me crying and said, “Mommy, don’t be a Weird-o.”

I can’t say yet how sudden menopause changed me, us. I looked at you differently, I know that. You became more and bigger. But the thing that utterly altered the way I look at you was not the cancer or the hysterectomy. It was Aaron, Cousin Kathy’s lanky, broad-shouldered boy.

It was raining that night. A lazy summer rain. Kathy wanted Aaron to stay home but he said, “I’m just gonna swing by and say hello to some people, Momma.” Years later, I asked her if he kissed her good-bye and she said, “Aaron wasn’t a kisser, he was a big eye-contact guy. He had this killer gaze, so we just cut our eyes at each other and he left.”

Kathy washed some dishes, changed into pajamas, met Tony and the girls downstairs for a movie, and went to bed.

It was hard to sleep—teenagers. But you can’t
expect them to play Scrabble every Friday and Saturday night.

Around 3 a.m., the phone rang. It was a friend of Aaron’s. A car, a convertible, had flipped.

In the pictures in the newspaper the next day, huge white sheets were draped over the car doors, to hide the ruin, but on the passenger side, I swear you could see a hand, in a loose fist, knuckles on the pavement. The police estimated the vehicle skidded sixty feet before it stopped. EMTs inflated an industrial balloon to raise the car and free the boys’ bodies.

The officers stood on Kathy’s stoop. She doesn’t remember how the conversation went but the words were said—the combination of
your child
and
I’m sorry
and
nothing we can do
and then someone said
dead
just to make sure there was no room for misunderstanding or denial or resistance, which could easily happen because next they explained
that they were taking her boy to the hospital, a place of healing.

She wanted to go with them. The officer kept telling her it wasn’t necessary. Of course it was. Mothers go to the hospital with their children. We hold their hands and look at them with our most reassuring expressions and whisper encouraging things like
The medicine will help you sleep
. We slip into the hall for a minute to talk openly with doctors. We make decisions and sign forms and go back into the room wearing that same put-on look of composure. We check for signs of pain, we reposition pillows and lower the bed and curse the paper-thin shades as we darken the room the best we can. We sit, we stand, we stare and stretch, we shudder and sit back down and hold our heads and decide it’s better standing. We lean over the bedside and run the backs of our fingers across our child’s cheek and close our eyes in a moment of
passion and physical memory of every other time we’ve touched that cheek, that singular orchid of a face.

The next night, Kathy took a shower, put on some Carmex, a long-sleeved T-shirt, a pair of nondescript black pants, and her most supportive shoes. Aaron’s body had been released from the hospital. He was laid out at the funeral home and visitors were welcome starting at 8 p.m. Kathy said they all went—Tony, the girls, grandparents, even a few friends.

The mortician had tucked a large white blanket around Aaron, like you would a baby, so all that showed was his face, no makeup and somehow no scratches. Around Aaron’s neck was a tiny cross that had once belonged to Kathy’s Italian grandfather. It was thick and old-fashioned and Aaron loved it. Around his head was a wrap to cover the skull damage, almost like a white ban
dana. Everyone told Aaron Stories, and one by one, everyone touched him. Even Kathy. Did she want to wake him, to beg him to open his eyes and sit up and come home? Did she want to yell at him,
Be careful! The roads are slick! Drive slowly around that bend!
No, she told me later, she wanted to memorize him. They only left because a staff person came in to say that the family of the other boy—Aaron’s friend Ross, who was also laid out there—were on their way over.

I tell you about Aaron because he died when you were both in diapers and his death has changed every day of our life together. I tell you about Aaron because I want you to live longer than he did. Even though I hope you have Aaron’s general trust in people and his belief that things usually work out, even though I want you to love people as easily and overtly as he did, I want you to be more cautious
and less optimistic. I want to keep you in the world where I can find you.

I hurt you once, Georgia. When you were three. I’d taken you to the Lawrence Hall of Science to look at displays about gravity and Saturn’s rings and the crust of the earth. Afterward, we headed home for your nap. You were a great napper. On the way back to the car, you took a few steps away from me, right into traffic. I yanked you back as a car veered away from us, the driver pounding the horn. I squatted down and shook you, screaming, “Never! Never cross the street without an adult. Never! Do you hear me? Did you see that car? Never!” I could feel people watching. I was digging my fingers into your shoulders too deeply, and you cried because it hurt, but I didn’t care. It was worth it. I just thought,
She has to remember this, this might be my chance to save her
.

I think about Kathy all the time.

I wonder if she lives for the mention of Aaron’s name, hearing some story she’d forgotten or never knew, seeing his handwriting in a high school notebook under the sofa, an old photograph, a few frames of video.
Here he is at his christening, or holding out a handful of roly-poly bugs, or playing stickball in that field across from the Wawners’ house. Remember how he brought a one-pound bag of M&M’s to that girl he had a crush on—Carmen?—or how many times he snuck off to the lake to go fishing and then confessed—he could never lie—before going to sleep? Remember how he’d be lying back on his bed with his hands behind his head, looking at the ceiling, and when you’d ask him what he was doing, he’d say,
talkin’ to God,
or how, when we lived on the farm, he was always climbing that tree and then jumping out, over and over, like he was practicing for a jumping-out-of-trees contest?

I wonder if Kathy ever forgets entirely, then hates herself when it comes rushing back at her. I wonder whether she tells strangers that she has two kids or three. I wonder if she sometimes goes to sleep on a bed of Aaron’s clothes, breathing them in like so many scent squares.

I asked her recently if she ever wanted to kill herself. I don’t remember exactly how I put it, but she knew what I was getting at. She said no. She was still Maggie’s Momma and Lena’s Ma. She was still Tony’s wife. Someone still needed to fill Satchel’s dog bowl and take him for walks twice a day. There were still rivers to float on and yellow moons that stopped her short in the night and diner food. There were still days when she had the urge to wear her leopard-print loafers, something a seething person could not possibly do. There were still close lacrosse games that got her up on her feet and
Camp Wahoo, a place Aaron loved, where you could wear nothing but a bathing suit and flip-flops for days, play flashlight tag and paint rocks and build fires that lasted past midnight. There were still terrible arguments and painful conversations, confessions, makeup sex and speechless moments, and there were still sobbing children to be held and righted and sent back out into the world. All that wicked, wrenching aching could not nullify the fact that there was still a role for her—work to be done and happiness to be had.

She was sad, not bitter. “There’s a difference,” she said.

I remember having an awful conversation once, long before I became a mother, about whether it would be worse to lose a baby or a ten-year-old or a twenty-year-old, and so on. Why people think
about these things, I don’t know, but we do. We hover around the edges of catastrophe—trading headlines, reading memoirs about addiction and disease and abuse, watching seventeen seasons of
ER
. I said it would hurt the most to lose a twenty-year-old, because you’d have loved them so much longer and your attachment would be so much more specific. Babies love everyone and everyone loves them. But twenty-year-olds? They won’t lean into just anyone. You have to earn any sliver of intimacy you share with them. Some pale memory of trust and connection has to hold against the callous disregard that is adolescence. And at twenty, they are just on their way back to you.

Now, though, for me, the most unthinkable loss would be never to have had a child in the first place. That’s what I ended up saying to Meg (your “Aunt” Meg, who became family when we asked her to be Claire’s godmother).

I don’t know why Meg’s single. She’s crazy-accomplished—marathons, fund-raising projects with Tom Brokaw, conference calls with Bono. She almost went to ballet school instead of college and still has Dancer Ass. She has a master’s from the Kennedy School and worked for the World Bank. She reads
The Economist
and
People
.

But that’s not why I love her. I love her because she gave her friend most of her savings when the financial markets imploded—in fact, she insisted on it. I love her because she pinches mold off her bread instead of tossing the loaf, she bakes casseroles, and always sends thank-you notes, like the well-raised girl from Topeka that she is. I love her because she has photographs all over her apartment of African villagers from her Peace Corps years, but none of the frames match and they’re hung willy-nilly and all the nails and wires show. I love the way she is with her sister and brothers,
how they tease each other and roll their eyes and say
Duh
but keep coming back together—helping with cable modems, flat tires, moves. I love that they are going to puke when they read this nice stuff about Meg and start calling her something totally juvenile like Mold Pincher.

I meet people at cocktail parties all the time, women who are moody or mean-spirited, and then their charming husband comes up with a nice, fresh drink for them and I always think, what does she have that Meg doesn’t? Why does this woman get someone to sleep next to, someone to call when the dryer breaks, someone to bitch about to her friends? Meg is so much better. I’d marry her in a second.