My Parents Died Before Graduation and I Thought No One Would Be There for Me — Then Two Hands Covered My Eyes From Behind

So I already knew, weeks before the day, that Evelyn would not be able to sit in those hot metal bleachers for three hours to watch me walk across a stage.

I had made my peace with it.

Or I had told myself I had, which is a different thing.

I have thought a great deal since about what her grief must have been that year, and how little I saw of it at the time, wrapped up as I was in my own.

Because I was not the only one in that house who had lost people in November.

Evelyn had buried her son.