Who we are when everything is stripped away, in our barest moments, is something we don’t routinely examine. When a horrific loss uproots us, we leave pieces of ourselves behind in the soil, the structure on which we built our identity reduced to nothing more than an absent appendage, left behind to rot. We define ourselves, our very identity, by our relationships, and when we lose someone, in the exchange we lose a noun that defined who we once were. We return to our lives as truncated versions of ourselves. We cease being wives, mothers or daughters as we accrue losses. We become the next
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