My husband, Gene, and my daughter, Laurel, had d*ed in a car accident on the interstate.
Gone, both of them, on the same gray afternoon.
What made it worse — what I’ve never said out loud to most people — is that Laurel and I weren’t speaking when she d*ed.
We’d had a terrible fight a couple of years before. Hard words, the kind you assume you’ll have time to take back.
She moved away. She stopped calling. I was too proud and too hurt to be the first to reach out.
And then a trooper was standing on my porch, and there was no more time to take anything back, ever.
Grief nearly took my mind.
The only place I could breathe was a little church down the road, where a group of us volunteered for children in foster care — diapers, toys, books, clothes.
Helping other people’s children was the only thing that filled the hole where mine had been.
