They Were About to Split Up Five Kids Under Seven. The One Man Willing to Take All Five Knew Exactly What That Does to a Child

I had used that grip.

My hands remembered it before my head caught up, and once that happened, I was never really going to be able to walk away.

I should explain what I mean, because “I understood how they felt” is the kind of thing people say without having earned it, and I had earned it the hard way.

When I was small and the world was ending, I held onto my sisters and my baby brother exactly like that — fistfuls of coat, knuckles white — as if my grip were the one thing keeping our family from being subtracted a person at a time.

And I remember, with a clarity that has never faded, the precise moment my grip stopped being enough: a grown-up’s kind hands closing over my small ones and gently, so gently, peeling my fingers off my sister’s sleeve.