You do not have to disappear to be good, and the love that asks you to is not love, and there is still time — there is almost always still time, more than I had — to set down the smallness and pick up your own name and answer, at last, to yourself.

I am Henrietta Cardiff.

I taught hundreds of children to read.

I gave a man a kidney and a stranger’s children a home, and I gave myself, right at the end, the one thing I had never once given her in fifty-eight years, which was back.

It was enough.

It was, in fact, everything.