Hello Beautiful

by Ann Napolitano

“We’re like a clock that doesn’t keep time anymore,” she said. “He’s not ambitious. He never knew what to do, so he wanted me to give him instructions for everything, big and small. I’m a fast walker, and he’s slow. I thought I needed a husband, because that’s what we were told as little girls, right? Or maybe not told but shown. It didn’t occur to me that I might be better on my own. I was carrying him, Sylvie.”

anyone that dresses and does their hair as carefully as your mom does every single day is unhappy on the inside. She’s trying to hide all her messiness, and I want better than that for you.”

Charlie had told his daughter what he perhaps needed to believe: that everything was beautiful, which meant his life—even though it disappointed Rose, even though it was almost over—had beauty. It was true: It had, everything did. Since her diagnosis, Sylvie saw beauty everywhere: in a perfectly arranged shelf of books, in the smile Emeline offered the baby in her arms, in the familiar lines of William’s face. Sylvie would catch herself staring at the stripes of light on the library floor, marveling at their loveliness.

All three of them had lost time and love with people who deserved both. When William thought of himself as a lonely little boy dribbling a basketball in the park, he believed, perhaps for the first time, that he had deserved his parents’ attention. And in that moment, he forgave them.

She was tying together who she’d been in the first half of her life with who she had become. She was stitching her life and heart together, and she wanted to keep it all before her: a beautiful whole.

When your love for a person is so profound that it’s part of who you are, then the absence of the person becomes part of your DNA, your bones, and your skin.

“When an old person dies,” Kent said, “even if that person is wonderful, he or she is still somewhat ready, and so are the people who loved them. They’re like old trees, whose roots have loosened in the ground. They fall gently. But when someone like your aunt Sylvie dies—before her time—her roots get pulled out and the ground is ripped up. Everyone nearby is in danger of being knocked over.”