She sat down, sick and exhausted, and she used some of her small and dwindling store of energy not on herself, not on her own comfort or her own fear, but on writing out, in advance, the absolution her daughter would need on the worst day of that daughter’s life.

She forgave me for something I had not even done yet.

She prepared my rescue from a grief she would not be alive to see.

That is a kind of love I am not sure I will ever be capable of, and I am certain I did nothing to deserve it.

And it taught me something about what my mother had been doing, quietly, my entire life, that I had never once perceived: she had always been a few steps ahead of my pain, clearing it from my path before I arrived, so smoothly that I grew up believing the path had simply always been clear.

The note in the trunk was not an exception.