And my mother had looked at it — this dying man’s whole sense of who he had been — and seen loose change.

She had photographed it, and written a listing, and sold it to a stranger, and spent the money on shore excursions, and thought nothing of it.

That is not greed.

Greed at least wants something.

This was something emptier than greed: an inability to see that anything mattered to anyone if it did not matter to her.

She could not feel the weight of those medals because she had never in her life felt the weight of anything that was not hers.

And I understood, standing in front of that bare cabinet, that I had spent my whole childhood mistaking that emptiness for strength — calling my mother tough, unsentimental, practical — when the truth was simply that there was a place in her where other people’s meaning was supposed to register, and it had never once switched on.