Or rather, I fell apart in private, at night, in the dark, in the long hours after he finally slept, and I held myself together in the daylight because a baby cannot be raised by a woman in pieces.

I buried my daughter on a gray morning with the baby in my arms, and then I went home to the quiet house that had held the two of us and now held the two of us again, a different two, a grandmother and a grandson where a mother and a daughter had been, I used to catch myself, in Noah’s early years, doing a kind of terrible arithmetic, calculating the odds of my own body lasting long enough to finish the job.

I was not old, exactly, but I was old to be starting over with an infant, and I knew that Noah needed me to make it, healthy and present and solvent, for at least another eighteen years, and the awareness of that need changed how I lived.

I ate better.