Part Two: Rebecca
To understand what happened on that terrace you have to understand what Pamela Gable had actually walked into, and what she had spent two years standing next to.
Rebecca Ann Caldwell was a middle school art teacher who had married a second lieutenant at twenty-four knowing exactly what that meant, and who had told me on our fourth date that she had a rule about not dating soldiers and that she was breaking it, and that I should not make her regret it.
She was funny in a way I am not.
She was untidy in a way that used to genuinely upset me and which I would now pay money to have back in my house.
She could not be on time to anything and she did not care, and after eleven years I had stopped caring either, which I consider the single greatest personal growth of my adult life.
Hannah was born when Rebecca was thirty-four and I was thirty-three, after four years of trying and one loss that we did not talk about for a long time.
Rebecca got sick in the spring that Hannah was three.
It was not one of the illnesses that gives you a year to prepare.
From the first appointment to the last one was eleven weeks.
She was diagnosed in April and she died in July, and I do not intend to write out the details of those eleven weeks because they belong to us and because they are not the point of this.
What is the point is this: Hannah was four years old, and she was in the house for most of it, and she does not have a coherent memory of her mother.
She has fragments.
She has a specific memory of Rebecca’s hands doing something with a paintbrush and a jar of water.
She has the smell of a particular hand cream, which we still buy, and which sits in a cabinet in our bathroom to this day and which is not for anybody’s hands.
Everything else she has, she has because somebody gave it to her.
That is what people who have not been through this do not understand about photographs on a refrigerator.
For a child who lost a parent at four, those objects are not decoration and they are not grief and they are certainly not a shrine.
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