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How do you learn to cherish your life when grief has made it unrecognizable?
I am starting to feel that we do so not by trying to fill a void that can never be filled but by living as best as we can in this strange, yawning terrain our loved ones have left behind, exploring its jagged boundaries and learning to see it as something new. I believe this because I feel that I am becoming someone new—someone who can remember, and mourn, and live without punishing herself.
The answer couldn’t be more obvious to me if it were written in the air before us, but I understand why she asks, because I know the feeling of unworthiness all too well. I have always felt as though I have something to prove: I have to do more, be better, to make other people’s gifts and offerings worthwhile; to earn their care or justify their faith. I spent years trying to live up to the noble sacrifice I believed my birth
parents had made, while also trying to be good enough for other people to love. I am still living as if the choices made by others—from my first parents giving me up, to my adoptive parents loving me and then letting me leave—are debts I have to repay, marks in a ledger I can never hope to expunge. Even this trip, and all the essential tasks I’ve assigned myself—have I not approached them as though I have something to atone for? As if there exists some list of things a good daughter does for her dying parent, responsibilities I didn’t fulfill for my father, and now I have to prove my love and
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