You cannot argue a child out of shame with logic alone.

But you can build her a cabinet, and let the cabinet say what words struggle to.

The point of it, I told Hannah, was not to trap ourselves in grief, not to build a shrine and live inside our sadness.

The point was the opposite.

It was to carry our family’s whole history forward with us, out in the open, unhidden, so that no one could ever again make either of us feel that Rebecca was a secret to be tucked into the back of a drawer.

Grief, I have come to think, is not a problem to be solved or a phase to be gotten through and left behind.