Eleven pounds is what you weighed when I brought you home from the hospital 58 days after your birth. For the first year of your life, you slept on top of me every night, an increasingly heavy but reassuring weight.

I know I only have a few seconds to relish the deep wave of love that comes over me when I see his face. It will soon be replaced by the need to fortify myself. His anger will surface soon and I will be blamed in some way for his suffering. I’ve had to crawl my way out of the pit that was my obsession with his well-being. It took fifteen years. It felt like a betrayal to him, but it had to happen.

There is irony in undergoing a passive medical procedure to be active again. And it’s painful knowing the thing I love to do is hurting me in return. In this case, freedom illuminates the fragile cage of my body.

I counted all the ways I was not enough. Looked for all the reasons I wasn’t worthy of walking among the healing, could these others see it on me? Could they smell it? Did the way I walked betray it? Emblazoned on my spine like a title: The Rape Kit. The Rape Survivor. The Rape Victim. The Rape. The Rape. The Rape that was as essential to me then as my own heartbeat. Maybe more.

The next years will bring more depressing discoveries, I am sure. More moments of fear; more wrestling matches with my mean brain. The familiar field of my body will be a source of anxiety as wrinkles change the shape of my face, new aches arise, and I find lumps in unexpected places.

When judging character, I place a lot of weight on how someone interacts with children, even when I’m not pregnant. He passed the test. It wasn’t long until things progressed—and fast. He moved in before the baby was born. Twenty-three years later, he’s still here.

I navigate through the world each day by locating others' perceived problems and calculating what I can do to fix them. Rarely does anyone ask me to intervene in their (non-)problems. It's an instinct as ingrained in me as the urge to hold your breath when you plunge into the ocean. Often, I'm not even helpful.

“You’re going to find out what happened to Mom?” he asked, a little nervous. But he quickly granted permission. What was he hoping for, I wonder? As I reflect now – years after my dad’s death – I think he wanted those charts to document her love. Perhaps some doctor’s notes confirming that Isabel never meant to leave her three sons.

We found, as we shared our interpersonal lives, that our narratives varied in circumstance, from illness to accident, stillbirth, and suicide, but the outcome for each of our children had been the same. Child loss, in many ways ostracizes one from their known realms of society and we sought out a more authentic connection to those with knowing hearts.

Love soon meant the warmth of tears on my cheeks, the itch that came with the healing of skin cut and rubbed raw by the carpet in his bedroom. It meant a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, the unbearable knowledge that I had been irreparably changed.

Isn’t that what we all want? Someone to come alongside us? Someone to fill the empty spaces in our stories? If we pay attention, our most vulnerable fellow humans are teaching us how to bear witness, how to join, how to show up.

Is it possible my life story is entwined with his? That there is no coincidence? Might there be some form of "atonement" among various members of my family for this past? I expand my family history research. Could I or my relatives be making amends or reparations through "good works"?

I’ve told my therapist I will stop referring to myself as a series of holes, but still, it happens. He doesn’t laugh, only watches me with a mixture of pity and trepidation as I bray at his video icon on the skype call. It’s not hurtful if you laugh at yourself. It’s not sad. Look at how I’m laughing. See how much fun I’m having, talking this way.

But my grandmother did not outlive us all. In fact, she died when I was twelve, around the same time my sister left, and I don’t know if it was from one of her self-diagnosed maladies but there you have it – she was afraid of dying and, boom, she was dead. Which proved something. And I began to be afraid too.

Dear Jesus. Please help Brian quit heroin for good this time. I look to the crucifix for a sign but Jesus just hangs there. His painted eyes are fixed on Brian, who thrashes, shakes, and grips his sweat-drenched sheet. Amen.

It's difficult to be close to someone you don’t know. And it’s difficult to know someone who doesn’t reveal who they are and what matters most to them. I didn’t realize as a teenager that understanding my mother would be a lifelong process. Perhaps she didn’t reveal herself because she did not truly know who she was, or perhaps she worried about being rejected. I was never sure.

I can’t find my oxygen at the bottom of a bottle but I can find the peaceful apathy. The kind you find at the bottom of a lake when the panic subsides and you stop trying to swim.

As the emotion grew (and maybe it was simply literary projection), so too grew a fear of love. At an age where kids were meanest to themselves, to admit openly not only that you loved someone, but another boy, carried with it a heavy stigma. What would I do if I ever faced Tommy’s look of disgust? Maybe I shouldn’t tell him. At least not in the seventh grade.

Those of us in the last chapter of our lives know there are many things we may not get to do. Nonetheless, there is much we can do and, more to the point, do better. The word never implies finality. Never implies impossibility, another word I despise. Never suggests defeat, bordering on despair. It’s an awful word.

Before you hurt me, I had so much beauty. Before I knew any better, everything tasted sweet. I was a child, after all, even bitter vegetables are fun to push around a plate.