Excerpt from: Huffington Post (click for full article)
She's right. It's hard on Betty Wood. Her grief is deep and old and full of memory. We make a tiny trellis out of sticks to hang on the Christmas tree. Ten times a day, Betty checks to make sure it's still there. We walk through the layering snow, her bony, mittened hand in mine. I say to her quietly, "Betty Wood lives in the woods."
She stops, shakes her bird-fluff head, looks into the unseeable distance, her smile wistful, and there it is again -- that glimpse of her what-if life, the brilliant "normal" life she might have lived.
But what of this life? What do I think I'm seeing, at these moments, that doesn't already exist? This is Betty: here, now, her eyes filled with sympathy and understanding. And yes, a kind of brilliance. The intellectual chasm between us divides, and I'm on the wrong side. From here, she looks like the kindly, durable person she has always been: the big sister shoring up in sorrow, charging ahead to the unknown and unknowable, showing her little sister how it's done.
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