And I understood it, from the moment the lawyers first named the figure, as something else entirely: as the final decision Jonathan and I would ever make together as parents.

When we wrote those wills three years ago, at a kitchen table, with a lawyer’s boilerplate in front of us and our two children asleep upstairs, we had been doing the most ordinary and most loving thing that parents do — trying to reach past our own possible deaths to keep protecting our children.

We could not have imagined the specific horror that actually came, could not have dreamed that the wills would be triggered not by one of us dying but by all of us dying except me.

But the impulse behind those documents, the love that wrote them, survived the catastrophe intact.