My daughter’s courage was the courage to be truly seen, to stand in the open with her whole self showing and let the lens, and the world, take her exactly as she was, unedited and unhidden.

And these are the two halves of a single kind of bravery, the bravery of truth: the courage to see, and the courage to be seen.

My sister possessed neither.

She spent her life refusing to see herself honestly, and refusing to be seen honestly, hiding behind curated images and rewritten stories and a flawless online mask, and that double refusal was, in the end, what destroyed her, because a life built entirely on the avoidance of the truth cannot survive the truth’s arrival, and the truth always, eventually, arrives.

My children chose the opposite.