I carry my son’s laughter and those two empty rooms in the same chest, every day, and I have stopped trying to resolve the contradiction, because there is no resolving it.

Some things simply cannot be fixed, only witnessed, and the witnessing matters even when the fixing is impossible.

That is part of why I do the work I do now — not because I can give those two families their children back, because I cannot, no one can — but because bearing witness to what was done, refusing to let it be smoothed over and forgotten, is the one thing still in my power, and it is not nothing.

The truth I dug up did not save every child.