Everything we had shared, every ordinary and precious moment of my childhood, existed now only in me; she was the other half of those memories and she could no longer find her half.

And I understood, kneeling by that tub, that memory is not just a record of love.

It is part of the love itself.

To be known by someone — to have them carry your shared history inside them, to be recognized on sight as theirs — that is a thing so woven into what it means to be loved that you never notice it until it is taken away.

My mother would come to love me again, I would learn; she did.