She Called Me Six Times and I Never Answered. When I Found Out Why, I Revoked My Own Mother’s Access Before I Hung Up the Phone

I did not call my legal counsel.

I did not call the firm.

My hands had gone strangely steady, the way they do when a thing stops being grief and starts being a problem to solve.

There was a version of me — most of the versions of me, over the years — that would have called the firm’s general counsel first, that would have wanted the situation managed, the exposure assessed, the narrative controlled.

That instinct is a large part of what had cost me my marriage in the first place: the reflex to treat every human catastrophe as a matter to be routed to the right department.