My Stepdaughter Had Not Spoken to Me for Five Years Until a Heavy Package Arrived at My Door

to accept the people who remained, because accepting them would have meant accepting the loss. As long as she kept me at a distance, as long as she could tell herself I did not matter, she could maintain the fiction that her mother was only temporarily away, that the ending was not final. It was not rational. She knew it was not rational. But grief continue reading …