It was the first of many such gifts, most of them equally invisible, none of them anything she set out to give.

She could not have known, at fourteen months, that her mere existence was performing surgery on the two men in her orbit, opening us up, softening what had gone hard, teaching us things about ourselves that decades of life had failed to teach.

That is, I have come to believe, one of the quiet powers of children, and especially of a child who asks for nothing but to be loved: they change the adults around them not by trying to, not through any effort or intention, but simply by being present and needing to be cared for.

You cannot love a child properly and stay the same person you were.