Mark wrote about the first time he felt her kick.
He wrote about the tiny clothes we had bought before we knew how sick he was.
He wrote about wondering whether she would inherit my stubbornness or his terrible habit of leaving cabinet doors open.
I actually laughed when I read that.
Then I cried because I had laughed.
Grief can make even happiness feel disloyal.
A few lines later, Mark seemed to answer that feeling before I had even experienced it.
He told me that when life eventually gave me reasons to laugh again, I was supposed to take them.
He did not want our daughter raised inside a house where loving him meant being afraid to feel joy.
He wanted her to know him, but he did not want his death to become the biggest thing about her childhood.
That sentence changed something in me.
Until then, I had been thinking about memory as preservation.
