And I understood, sitting there, the shape of the whole tragedy, and how much of it was not hers but ours.

Because Rosa Martinez had been, my entire life, an immovable pillar.

When my father died a decade earlier, she was the one who held the family together while the rest of us fell apart.

When money was tight, she took in extra sewing work and stitched late into the night.

When I was accepted to college and we could not afford the fees, she sold her own mother’s gold earrings — the only heirloom she had — and never once mentioned it, so that I would not feel the weight of the gift.

In fifty-three years, I had never once heard my mother say the words I can’t. And so we had all made the same lazy, fatal assumption, year after year: that she was invincible.