I have thought about the precision of that answer many times since, because it draws a line that a great many people, in her position, cannot manage to draw.

She did not say she regretted nothing; that would have been a lie, and my grandmother did not lie, not even to comfort herself.

She had a real regret, a deep one — the regret of a mother looking at what her child had become and knowing, with terrible clarity, that some part of it traced back to a life she had built and a son she had raised.

That grief was hers, and she carried it, and she did not pretend it away.