There is no cure except to live the hell out of our lives, to take it apart, to put it back together, to dig it all up, and then fill the hole. To he… - Cheryl Strayed

compassion isn’t about solutions. It’s about giving all the love that you’ve got.

It hadn't occurred to me that my mother would die. Until she was dying, the thought had never entered my mind. She was monolithic and insurmountable, the keeper of my life. She would grow old and still work in the garden. The image was fixed in my mind, like one of the memories from her childhood that I'd made her explain so intricately that I remembered it as if it were mine. She would be old and beautiful like the black-and-white photo of Georgia O'Keeffe I'd once sent her. I held fast to this image for the first couple weeks after we left the , and then, once she was admitted to the wing of the hospital in Duluth, that image unfurled, gave way to others, more modest and true.

Perhaps being among the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I, too, could be undesecrated...the wilderness had a clarity that included me.