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Ava is seven years old today.
She has scars, both visible and invisible. For the first year, she wouldn’t sleep in a bed; she slept on the floor of my room, holding my hand. She is terrified of dark, enclosed spaces. We don’t play hide-and-seek. We don’t lock bathroom doors.
She loves strawberry ice cream, she is learning to play the piano, and she has a laugh that sounds like wind chimes.
Michael and I raise her together. We are a quiet household, vigilant and protective. We have learned that monsters don’t live under the bed; they live in the daylight, wearing smiles and making casseroles.
People often ask me how I knew. They ask me if I believe it was God, or a ghost, or a psychic premonition that made me go to the funeral home that night.
I tell them the truth: It wasn’t magic. It was a refusal to be polite.
We are taught, especially as women, to trust the process. To trust doctors, to trust funeral directors, to trust the narrative that is presented to us. We are taught that making a scene is the worst thing we can do.
But that night, my gut told me that the story didn’t fit. The math of the illness didn’t add up. The haste of the funeral felt wrong.
If I had been polite, if I had worried about “making a scene” or breaking the rules, my granddaughter would have woken up in the dark, six feet underground, with no one to hear her scream.
The Lesson
There is a lesson here, one that I need you to feel in your bones.
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