That she did not need what everyone else needs.

That her strength was a natural resource that would simply always be there, requiring no tending, like the air.

We had let her carry everything, our whole lives, precisely because she never dropped anything — never understanding that a person who never drops anything is not a person without burdens.

She is a person who has decided, at terrible private cost, that no one else should ever have to feel their weight.

And I have come to believe this is one of the cruelest and most common failures of love there is, and I did not invent it; I only practiced it, the way nearly everyone practices it, on the strongest person in their life.