I brought a homeless young mother and her baby home because she looked just enough like my dead daughter to make me stop walking. The next morning, I stepped into the guest house with breakfast and found something that left me standing there in shock.
I’m 58, and three years ago I buried my only daughter.
Now I live alone in a house that is too large and too quiet.
There is a guest house at the back of the property. No one lives there. No one visits long enough to need it.
That afternoon I was walking home from an exhibition downtown.
Three years ago, my daughter died after a sudden illness. I was there through all of it. The hospital. The silence after the doctors stopped pretending. The funeral. I was the one who brushed her hair and chose her dress and stood there doing the last things a mother should never have to do.
It does not.
It just teaches you how to speak around it.
That afternoon I was walking home from an exhibition downtown. I could have called a car, but the weather was warm and bright, and for once I thought maybe walking would do me good.
And for one terrible second, my heart stumbled.
