I had folded that card and tucked it inside my Bible, and it had traveled with me through every reassignment and deployment, through the ordinary mornings and the hard nights and the slow years in which my children grew old enough to ask me questions I could no longer answer with a distraction.

And when Theodore died, I understood that my children deserved to stand, once, beside the grave of the one grandfather who would have loved them — the one man in that family who never got the chance to know they existed.

I have thought a great deal about that card, about why one small piece of cardstock from an old man mattered so much that I carried it around the world for a decade.

And I think it is because it was proof — the only proof I had, for a long time — that I had not imagined my own worth.