The years were still lost.

The empty frame was still empty.

But something had shifted, all the same, and I came eventually to understand what it was.

For fifteen years I had held the whole truth alone, believing that holding it alone was my job, that a good father absorbs the darkness so his children can live in the light.

And in one afternoon my daughters had reached out and taken the truth into their own hands, and had not been destroyed by it, and had in fact been made stronger and freer by finally holding it.

I had been so afraid of what the truth would do to them that I had never considered what carrying it alone was doing to me.

Now the weight was shared, spread across seven pairs of hands instead of borne on one pair, and it turned out that a truth shared among people who love each other weighs almost nothing at all.

That is the thing I wish I had understood fifteen years earlier.

I would have been so much less alone.