Anna has decided, without consulting anybody, that I am Aunt Ruth. I told her she absolutely doesn’t have to call me that and she said, “But I want to,” with the finality of an eight-year-old, and that was the end of that discussion.
What I’ve Stopped Doing
I’ve stopped grieving the years.
I want to be clear that I did grieve them. For about two weeks I grieved them so hard I couldn’t get out of bed before ten.
Forty-one birthdays. The house we didn’t buy. The arguments we didn’t have. The version of my life where his handwriting on an envelope meant something ordinary instead of something historic.
We won’t get those back. I’ve made my peace with it, mostly.
But I’m not going to waste whatever this is mourning a thing I can’t change.
What I’d Say to Anybody Sitting on Something
For most of my life, I believed that meeting the right person at the wrong time meant you’d simply lost your chance. That timing was destiny, and if you missed the window, that was that.
