But I was Tess’s person. We were a unit. We were family. Because I loved her with almost drunken abandon, and because she loved me so completely and deeply, I believed I might love Tess back to life. I knew I could not do this for my mother. Her person was my father, and he had already passed on to a place she was eager to go. Yet I knew at that moment where I needed to be: in the hospital in Virginia, by my mother’s side, where perhaps there was still hope of another kind of healing.
