Loving Your Child Is an Instinct; Shielding Him From the Consequences of What He Did to Another Human Being Is Something Else Entirely — I Learned the Difference at Sixty, at the Door of a Chicken Coop

But I saw the first thread pulled, and I chose not to see the rest, and I flew to another continent while a young woman I was meant to love was left alone with a man I already had reason to fear.

There is a particular weight to that kind of guilt — not the guilt of the one who did the harm, but the guilt of the one who looked away — and I have learned that it is real and deserved, and also that it is not the same as being the one who caused it.

It took me a long time, and a good doctor, to learn to hold both of those true at once.

But in that hospital room, listening to Natasha, I did not yet have that distinction, and the guilt came down on me like a roof.