Three years earlier, I’d buried both of my own children, following a car accident. For months afterward, I kept their bedroom doors firmly closed. Then I started leaving them open instead, because closed doors somehow felt considerably worse. My daughter, Sophia, had left a sweatshirt hanging over her desk chair. My son, Toby, had three library books stacked beside his bed. I genuinely couldn’t bring myself to move a single item.
People kept telling me my grief would eventually change, maybe even fade away entirely. They were technically right about that. It changed from something that crushed me fresh every single morning into something I simply learned to carry silently, without anyone else ever noticing.
Eventually, the silence in that house became genuinely unbearable. That’s precisely why, on one rainy Tuesday, I walked into a foster care agency and told a woman named Patrice I wanted to talk about becoming a parent again.
