...the ultimate dwindling resource in the human arrangement isn’t cheap oil or potable water or even common sense, but mercy. - Cheryl Strayed

But I wasn’t out here to keep myself from having to say I am not afraid. I’d come, I realized, to stare that fear down, to stare everything down, really — all that I’d done to myself and all that had been done to me. I couldn’t do that while tagging along with someone else.

Maybe you have to know the darkness before you can appreciate the light,” I

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.