For Six Months After I Buried My Husband and Both My Children, My Family Sent Cheerful Group-Chat Messages and a Party Invitation as if Nothing Had Happened — Then My Name Hit the News Attached to $18.7 Million, and Suddenly Every One of Them Remembered My Number

It could take Maya and Rowan, who had been erased from a highway on an ordinary morning, and write them instead into the world in a way that would outlast every person who had chosen a birthday dinner over their graves.

I had thought a great deal, over those six months, about erasure, because that is the second death that comes for the young especially, and it is the one a grieving parent fears most in the dark.

When a person dies old, they leave a wake behind them — careers, friendships, children, a whole spreading delta of a life that keeps their name in the world for decades.

But a child who dies at seven, at four, has not yet had time to leave that wake.