A father talked about his daughter’s stubborn insistence that he learn to cook.

No one measured grief against anybody else’s.

I wrote Hannah’s name on a purple ribbon and tied it to the display.

Then I thought about the first time she’d spoken to me about donation.

I had told her not to talk that way.

I’d believed that refusing to imagine her death might somehow protect her from it.

She had looked at me with the patient frustration that only a daughter can give her mother and asked me to listen.

I hadn’t understood everything she was trying to say.