“I know you never meant that.”
“Still, I spent years trying to be quiet enough not to make you sad.”
“Now I’m going to have two daughters.”
“I already love them more than I know how to say.”
“And I’m scared.”
“Not of them.”
“Of what grief can make people believe.”
“He will love them.”
“I know that.”
“He doesn’t know how much he’s already healed in me.”
“Someday I’ll tell him.”
“I know I’m probably worrying about nothing.”
“But if something happens to me, he’ll blame himself.”
“He’ll think there was something else he should have said or done.”
“Please don’t let the girls grow up thinking their mother was someone they cost him.”
“Tell him I trusted him.”
“Tell him I wanted them.”
“And please, Mom.”
“Don’t disappear.”
“You promised.”
“I want my girls to know they were wanted.”
“Always.”
I read the letter twice.
One sentence stopped me.
He doesn’t know how much he’s already healed in me.
For three months, I’d replayed the hospital decision, convinced I’d betrayed Mary.
Yet she’d remembered something entirely different.
An evening in our bedroom.
A question I hadn’t understood.
An answer I’d almost forgotten.
Without realizing it, I’d helped her believe she was worthy of love.
“She trusted me?”
Her mother nodded.
“Even knowing what might happen?”
“She wasn’t expecting to die. She was afraid because she knew what it was like to grow up around grief.”
I reread Mary’s words.
Tell him I trusted him.
At the hospital, I’d waited desperately for the doctors to offer another solution.
Then she’d squeezed my hand.
“The girls. Obviously the girls.”
I’d believed that touch meant goodbye.
Perhaps she’d also been asking me to respect the decision she’d already made.
