It is a slow, daily, unwitnessed devotion that becomes, somewhere along the way, without your ever deciding it, simply the shape of your life.

I did not think of it as sacrifice while I was doing it.

It was only later, looking back, that I could see how much of myself I had quietly poured into those years — and how little I had expected, or wanted, in return.

There was a strange grace in the braiding of it, too, that I did not appreciate at the time.

My son was small in those years, and so his whole childhood was spent in a house with a dying grandmother in it, and I used to worry about that — whether it was too much shadow for a little boy, too much of endings, when a child should be all beginnings.