Part One: The Box

A nurse gave me a box on the fourth day and I did not open it for eleven months.

That is the beginning, and everything else in this account comes out of the eleven months, because if I had opened it in the room I would have known inside forty seconds and my whole life would have been a different shape.

It was cardboard.

About the size of a shoebox, covered in a patterned paper — small blue stars on cream — that I later learned is bought in bulk by the hospital’s auxiliary and assembled by volunteers on Tuesdays.

She put it on the tray table beside my bed and she put her hand flat on the lid for a second before she took it away, which is a thing I have thought about a great deal since.

Her name was Bernadette Kaur.

She was a NICU nurse and I had never seen her before in my life and I would not see her again for four years.

She said: “This is for you.

It’s from all of us upstairs.

There’s no hurry with it — some people open it in the room and some people open it in ten years and both of those are all right.”

And then she said one more thing, and it is the only sentence anybody said to me in that hospital that was not a lie or a kindness built on top of one.

She said: “Mrs.

Renfrew, whenever you do open it, I’d like you to read the card first.

Before anything else in the box.”

I said something.

I do not know what.

I was four days out from an emergency cesarean and three days out from being extubated and I was on a great deal of medication, and my husband was standing at the foot of the bed with a cup of coffee, and I had been told that one of my sons had died during delivery.