I stayed close through those first several months, partly because that’s simply who I am with my brother, and partly because I understood, better than almost anyone else could, exactly what those first months were costing him emotionally, watching him work through grief he’d apparently been quietly outrunning for five years.
“I used to think I’d dealt with losing Mom,” he told me one evening, about four months after Nora was born, the two of us sitting on his back porch while Renee put the baby down for the night inside. “I went to the funeral. I helped clean out her house. I thought that was dealing with it. I don’t think I actually let myself feel any of it until I was standing in that hospital room looking at the exact same mark on my own daughter’s back.”
“Grief doesn’t really work on a schedule,” I said. “I don’t think either of us fully processed it either, honestly. I just happened to have five years of a toddler keeping me too busy to notice how much I hadn’t.”
“Do you think Nora’s going to be okay?” he asked, quieter now. “Genuinely. Not the version of the answer you think I need to hear.”
“I think she has considerably better odds than Mom ever had,” I said. “I think she has a father who’s terrified enough to make sure she never misses a single one of those dermatology appointments for the rest of her childhood. I think that fear, once you’ve actually processed it instead of running from it, is going to make you a better parent than most people manage to be without ever facing anything like it at all.”
