The first thing that my father said to me when my mother died was that she had loved me. And at the time, I thought, what a ridiculous thing to say. Not because her love was evident to me—it was not and is not, really, an evident thing—but because he thought it meant so much to me and I felt at the time that it didn’t. I scoffed and made a joke and he said it again: She loved you. You know that, right? She loved you. It wasn’t the sort of thing that we said in my family. My family was a series of hushed rages behind shut doors. We didn’t say I love you or good night or good morning. The very
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