“‘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”

not a woman who went quiet. She was a woman who processed, assessed, and responded, sometimes quickly, sometimes after careful deliberation, but always with a response.

The silence in December was different.

It was the silence of someone sitting with something she was not ready to speak to.

And it lasted long enough that Gerald called me on New Year’s continue reading …