How many living things are treated as dead, how many present things as absent, how many real problems as solved, because the authorities have signed the paper and the rest of us have stopped looking?

My daughter taught me, at the cost of the worst night of my life, to be suspicious of closed questions, to keep looking even when I have been told there is nothing more to see, to trust my own eyes and ears over the comfortable authority of a signed document.

Chloe did not know she was supposed to give up.

And in her refusal to give up, in her simple, stubborn, loving insistence on looking at what was actually in front of her rather than accepting what she had been told, she did the thing that saves lives, and marriages, and truths, again and again, in a world too quick to close its questions: she kept looking.

It is the thing I most want to be, now, for the rest of my life.

The one who hasn’t stopped looking.