It is the refusal to let the worst thing that ever happened to me have the last word about my life.

Beckett wanted to be the ending of my story — the grand tragic finish, the complication in the delivery room, the funeral he’d bought lilies for.

He is not the ending.

He is not even a large part of the middle anymore.

He is a closed door in a house I no longer live in.

And the story went on without him, out here where the salt wind comes off the water and a small girl who was never supposed to be born runs laughing across a sunlit floor, certain, in the bone-deep way only a loved child can be, that the world is a safe and open place and that all of it belongs to her.

It does.

I made sure of it.

That is the whole of what I have to say.