I thought about how she laughed — a big, unguarded laugh that she never learned to make smaller, that turned heads in restaurants and that I would give the rest of my body to hear one more time.

I thought about how she had held our newborn daughter and cried, and how she had held our daughter again years later and told her, gently and without fear, that Mama was going to be going away but would never really be gone.

She had been braver about her own death than I have ever been about anything, including the convoy.

And I thought, sinking step after sinking step through the cooling sand with our daughter’s hand in mine, that the least I could do — the very least, after everything she had given me — was carry her the last little way to the water she loved, even if every step cost me, even if the sand fought me the whole way.

She had carried me through the hardest years of my life.

I could carry her down a beach.