I did not want the mothers we helped to feel, even for a moment, that they now owed us something, that they had traded one weight for another.

Arthur’s money had come to me without hooks, freely given, and I was determined to pass it on the same way.

When one of our mothers got the telephone call, I wanted her to feel only the pure clean lightness of a terror lifted, the same lightness I had felt in that hospital chair when the surgeon smiled, with nothing attached to it, nothing expected in return, no ledger opened in her name.

That, I had decided, was what the foundation would be.