My mother died when I was twelve. What I remember most isn’t the crying—it’s the smell of antiseptic in the hospital and the way my sister stood at the funeral. Back straight.
Chin lifted. As if grief were something she could physically restrain by refusing to bend. She was nineteen.
And that was the day she stopped being a teenager and became my entire world. She quit college without telling anyone. Took two jobs.
Learned how to stretch a single grocery list into a full week of meals. Learned how to smile so convincingly that even I believed her every time she said, “We’ll be fine.”
And for a long time, it looked like we were. I thrived.
