Because a monster does not save a lock of her daughter’s baby hair for forty-three years.

A monster does not press a fourth-grade science ribbon flat and keep it wrapped in tissue next to her son’s broken derby car.

The woman who had done those things loved me, plainly, enduringly, with her hands, across the very decades she was also capable of wounding me — and I had to sit on that bedroom floor and hold both of those truths at once, which is the hardest thing grief ever asks, harder than missing someone: to stop needing the dead to have been simple.

My mother was not the sentence.