“‘This is Diana—our family dropout,’ my mother said for the fifteenth Thanksgiving in a row, but when my sister’s new husband reached across the table to shake my hand, his grip locked, his face went still, and the room forgot how to laugh before he said the two words nobody there was prepared to hear”

fully made peace with it. And she had, without quite meaning to, handed the unfinished business to me.

I understood it.

I did not excuse it.

Those are not the same thing, and I had learned the difference between them somewhere around my third year in the Navy, in a context that had nothing to do with my family.

Understanding why something happened does continue reading …