that point with me. She simply nodded slowly, and something in her own expression shifted — not quite relief, exactly, but something adjacent to it.
The days that followed weren’t loud ones, particularly, but they carried genuine weight regardless, settling over our family like a fine layer of dust that wouldn’t easily brush away.
Various family members offered their own opinions, unprompted. Some spoke in careful defense of my mother’s choice. Others offered quiet, unspoken agreement with my own uncertainty about the whole thing. At one particular family dinner, my aunt
