It lowers you an inch at a time, so gradually that you never feel yourself descending, until one day you look up from the bottom of a well and cannot remember climbing down, and cannot quite believe the sky was ever any closer.

I had been at the bottom of that well for years.

And the strangest, most disorienting part of those first days at my parents’ table was not grief and was not anger.

It was the vertigo of being handed back my own normal — of remembering, with a start, that a home was supposed to feel like this: loud, and easy, and safe, a place where a child ate her dinner without fear and a woman was thanked for making it.

I had forgotten.