“He’s got one narrator and it’s him.

That’s the only thing I’m actually defending.”

Item seven of nine, and the only one I have never once been tempted to argue with.

My sister and I speak about four times a year and it is careful.

She lives in Denver, she was not in any of it, and she has a relationship with our mother that I do not require her to defend, and once — in the first year — she asked me to consider that our mother’s version might contain some truth, and I said, “It might,” and changed the subject, and she has not asked again.

The thing I did not expect, and which nobody warned me about, is the grief.