Coretta cried.

I did not, quite, but it was close, because I understood, signing those papers, that I was doing the truest teaching of my whole career: I was taking everything I had and spending it on the belief that a young person’s life is worth catching, that no one should be set down and forgotten, that every person deserves to be seen.

It was the opposite of furniture.

It was the most alive I had felt in twenty-two years, and I had a terminal diagnosis, and I was happier signing that endowment than I had been at my own wedding, and if that isn’t a lesson about how a person should live, I don’t know what would be.

I have wondered why it felt like joy and not like loss, giving away nearly everything I owned, and I think it is because there is a world of difference between a thing taken from you and a thing you choose to give.

For twenty-two years things had been taken — my evenings, my friendships, my name, my sense of my own edges — taken so gently, so far below notice, that I never got to feel the giving, only the slow subtraction.