Money can buy lots of things, but it cannot purchase time. It cannot give my mother back her youth. It cannot return the many years she spent without someone to tell her that her hair looked pretty on a Sunday afternoon. She gave up dinner dates, surprise gifts, and Valentine’s cards—except those sketched on construction paper in the shaky script of a middle school boy. She made that sacrifice so that I could have a stabler life. She succeeded, but at what cost?
