You can look at your son’s signature on a petition to have you declared incompetent and still understand, in the long-view way of someone who has buried the person she loved most, that he had chosen wrong and would have to live with that, and that your responsibility was not to manage his consequences but to remove yourself from them.
I had confused those two things for a very long time.
I was seventy years old and still protecting people from the results of their own choices because I had been trained, the way many women of my generation were trained, to believe that management was love and self-erasure was virtue. It was not love. It was habit. And habits can be broken.
The lavender in the garden still grows. It has survived three winters since that January, and each spring it comes back slightly more established, the way plants do when they are finally left alone to root properly. I added a second row this past April.
