I’m not going to lie; this has been a miserable weekend. I helped my sister and brother clean out our parents’ house, which required sifting through decades of accumulation. My mother was a saver. There were closets and drawers full of artifacts to excavate. The toughest thing, for me, was when I put the worn corduroys and cotton turtlenecks that still smelled like my mother into plastic bags to bring to Goodwill. I cried, because it all felt so final.

          But then, I started thinking about how her attributes have surfaced in my children.

          There’s her wildly dramatic romantic streak in Hannah, and her loyalty to family in Jake. There’s her gentleness and kindness, as well as her fretfulness, in Rachael, and her ability to always put others ahead of herself in Sarah. I see her sensitivity and love of routine in Eliza, and her fairness and gratitude for everything good in Micah.

          It’s funny; when my mother died, I wanted to be firmly resolute. I wanted to take grief on the chin. To that end, I deliberately spoke of her death without softening it with polite euphemisms. But what if we don’t actually die? What if we do pass on? Maybe it’s more accurate than idealistic to think of death as not the end of the road, but as an intersection. That way, anything’s possible.