“He would be so angry,” she wept, “if he knew you had spent twenty years using his love for you as a reason to punish yourself.

That is the opposite of what he gave his life for.” And I put my face in my mother’s shoulder, on a dirty sidewalk, my knees scraped like a child’s, and I cried out a grief and a guilt I had carried since I was ten years old.

I have thought a great deal about the difference between those two small words, because and for, and about how a whole life can be built on the wrong one.

For twenty years I had lived inside the word because.