When She Returned

by Lucinda Berry

But I wanted him to grow and change, experience new things too. His contentment with sameness was more maddening the older I got. How could we live our lives based on decisions we’d made when we were seventeen?

“You are tied to the life you created when you were a teenage girl to survive, but that life no longer serves you. Yet you can’t let go of it.

One of the worst things you could do to someone in the midst of tragedy was to give them a cliché, because the intensity of the loss was too big. I’d heard it all after James died. Sometimes it was better to say nothing.