Nobody had worried about whether I ate or slept since I was a boy at my own mother’s table.

And an eighty-four-year-old woman with a wandering mind, whom I was lying to for money, asked me every single week.

I have turned that over many times, trying to understand why it affected me so profoundly, and I think the answer is this.

For years I had been the one doing all the carrying.

I carried my mother, financially and physically and emotionally; I carried the bills and the fear and the long nights; I had become so accustomed to being the one who worried that I had forgotten there was any other way to exist.

I had forgotten what it felt like to be worried about.