During that first year without my mother, I would have been too afraid to look at the cover of Oh, the Places You’ll Go!, to let myself remember where I had been when she died. But when I cried with Elise, when I tried, at first, to separate this from that, I was allowing the type of sadness I had fought so fervently, the sober tears I had shunned while I tried to endure, tried to conquer. I try to welcome that sadness now, when I see my mother in Lizzie’s handwriting, when I hear my mother every time Tim says, Bye for now. Without allowing that sadness, I let loss dismember, eliminate my
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