Our goal was for me to not become overwhelmed by any of my usual reactions: sadness, anger, fear, regret, and—God help me—more shame. I’d been taking emotional shortcuts for more than a half century—steam-cleaning, beer drinking, and smart-assing my way through one trauma after another. But I was learning that you can’t fast-forward through grief or read a CliffsNotes version of your life and expect to make peace with it. As I revisited old memories, I allowed my new feelings to surface and hang around long enough to acknowledge and try to reconcile.
