each other, the only other person on earth who understood the exact shape of the hole. We grieve together now, on Emily’s day and on Michael’s day, and grieving together is so much lighter than grieving alone. My daughter knew that. That’s what she was giving us, in that letter. Not just a grandmother for her son. A companion for my grief, and one for Margaret’s.
My grandson is twelve now. He knows who he is. He knows where he comes from. The question that haunted his whole childhood — “who was my dad?” — has an answer now, a good one, a true one: a nineteen-year-old named Michael who loved his mother for one perfect summer and would have loved him beyond measure if he’d lived to meet him. My grandson carries that instead of a mystery, and it’s changed him — settled something, the way knowing your own story settles a
