For years, while I sent birthday cards and called on holidays and told myself the distance was mutual, Terry had been screwing grab bars into walls and filling pill organizers and sleeping with a monitor by his bed so he’d hear her if she fell.

I had known, in the abstract, that he was “helping with Mom.” I had not let myself know this.

There is a particular cowardice in the way we let ourselves not-know things that would obligate us.

I had built my not-knowing carefully, the way you build anything you intend to lean on.

When Terry mentioned, on one of our rare stilted calls, that Mom was “slowing down,” I heard slowing down and pictured a spry old woman moving a little more carefully to the mailbox, and I did not ask the follow-up questions, because the follow-up questions had answers, and the answers would have required me to get on a plane and walk back into a house I had promised myself I would never re-enter.

So I didn’t ask.