“But you always said you didn’t want one,” Anthony, my husband of six years, says, genuinely confused.

Turning a tad red and suddenly very warm, I, too, am baffled by my desire for a diamond engagement ring. I’ve been juggling and sitting on a confusing set of emotions for quite some time.

Before we married in 1987, many of our friends had been getting engaged. “Oh, did you see the size of her ring?” we’d always say simultaneously after seeing one after another bride-to-be wearing a hefty-carat ring.

“I’m a child of the 60s. My feminist self can’t be so cliché,” I’d told Anthony before we had become engaged, assuring him I didn’t need anything so conventional. Anthony took this in, and some months later, on a moonlit St. Lucia beach, he presented me with a small ruby ring and asked me to marry him.

“Oh, yes!” I’d answered, but before I took a breath, insisted, “I’m not changing my last name, and you have to wear a wedding ring as well.” I wanted to make damned sure this marriage was an equal partnership.

I was elated that we were getting married, yet, in truth, looking at that small stone, a little wave of disappointment swept through me every time I looked down. Come on, Abby. You said you weren’t into a traditional diamond ring. We love each other madly. That’s what’s important, I’ve admonished myself over the years, trying to override my covert disappointment.

All along, I’ve been cutting out pictures of alluring diamond rings from magazines, secretly stashing them in a manila folder, and rifling through them from time to time. Loving jewelry is in my blood. Growing up, my grandmother spent hours having me try on all her glamorous Art Deco necklaces, ornate rings, and cameos she adored, promising they would be mine someday. My mother collected unconventional pieces, and we often went through her jewelry box, trying on this one and that. The cool gold and smooth surfaces of the semi-precious stones felt glorious on my skin. Among all the jewels, however, there were very few diamonds, which neither my grandmother nor my mother truly cared about.

Today, knowing that wasn’t true for me, I gather my courage and speak to Anthony. “Well, I’ve changed my mind. I can’t quite explain it,” too embarrassed to admit to myself that I was not the pure feminist my Women’s Movement mother had trained; that deep down I had yearned for a diamond ring all along.

Anthony remains silent for what feels like endless moments. “All right, but I want to split the cost,” he finally says, a bit reluctantly. My stomach clenches, and I look away. It suddenly strikes me that I dearly want the ring not just as a gorgeous piece of jewelry but as a romantic emblem of his love for me. Still, since we always split all our expenses—rent, mortgage, groceries—I tell myself that his request is reasonable and within the boundaries I set long ago. You created your own box, Abby.

The next week, at the jewelers, I design my diamond ring, creating something a little different from any of those I’ve seen. And for years, every time someone remarks on it, I proudly say it was my design, hoping that, deep down, it will make up for my lingering disappointment of how it came about.

I remove my ring after our divorce, feeling it slip over my knuckle for what I believe will be the last time, following the norm of my now single status. Twenty-three years later, when selling my apartment, I go to gather any remaining jewelry. There, sitting inside the red velvet box, shines my beautiful diamond ring, and all my mixed emotions flood back.

My current partner of quite a few years and I are not married. It’s too bad I can’t wear this, flits through my brain. It will send a confusing message, I tell myself. But as I hold the sparkling diamond ring, my defiance of cultural norms returns. To hell with what people think. I grab the ring, slip it easily onto my finger, no longer caring about its symbolism, but rather owning that I created something beautiful I want the world to see.

Who would want to go to a G-rated movie when an R-rated one, a “dirty” movie, is an option?

My mother can choose whatever films tickle her fancy. But at age 11, she starts taking me, always arguing against the theater manager’s protestations. “I’m her mother! I have every right to decide what is appropriate for my daughter. I am the ultimate judge.” Heat shoots through my cheeks. I want to see the movie, but I hate drawing the manager’s scorn, shot at mom, but hitting me instead.

The ritual begins after eating at Moby Dick’s—the seafood place in New York on Madison Avenue and 84^th Street, with the netting and fake fish hanging across the window as part of the “atmospheric decoration.” Dinner, always with my grandparents, Duds and David, consistently turns ugly. In fact, my brother Harry and I would have designed escape-valve topics to bring up for when things inevitably erupted as we rode the cross-town bus on the way to meet everyone at the restaurant. “I’ll talk about what we did in Social Studies today,” I’d say, knowing full well it wouldn’t keep the peace.

After an alcohol-soaked meal—me drinking only Shirley Temples, saving that over-sweet, red-dyed cherry until I drained the glass—we cross the avenue to the theater with its flickering white sign announcing the title of the forbidden fruit. Duds takes Harry home, tut-tutting that David will join my mother and me on these outings.

I feel special, one of the adults, but also uneasy. On the one hand, going out to see them is a treat. None of my friends’ parents ever let them see anything other than movies rated G. The R-rating means there are always sex scenes, which, knowing my mother and grandfather are watching, too, makes me feel uneasy by the excitement that accompanies them. The confusing, small thrill is embarrassing, with them sitting on either side of me. Squeeze my legs together, trying to stop the tingle down there.

Tonight is a French movie. Two housekeepers are cleaning a hotel room. As they are pulling the sheets off the bed, one says to the other, “I always know when a couple has had sex the night before.” I am baffled. Is it that the sheet falls a certain way after making love? How could she tell just from making the bed? It will take many years before I “get it”—that there’s tell-tale evidence of dirt left behind.

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“Wait, I’m coming, too,” I shout.

Standing on shore, I lift the soft rose-red cotton sundress over my head, step out of my undies, and dive into the kiss of the Mediterranean Sea. At 37, fully naked, head bobbing rhythmically up and down, up and down, I breaststroke through the velvety warm water. Flipping onto my back, I float in the salty sea, drinking in the twinkling lights in the night sky.

As the water laps in and out of my ears, I hear my friends, my fellow travelers on the spiritual journey through Turkey, just slightly to the left. Their words are indistinct, but their laughter is clear. They are whooping with delight, seeing me toss caution to the wind, a trait I’m only just starting to embrace.

Normally, I am vigilant before acting, carefully weighing the ramifications of my every action. And with multiple debilitating autoimmune illnesses that have plagued me for three years, my life is quite prescribed—the foods I can and cannot eat, the time I must get to bed, the hours I have to rest, the amount of work I’m permitted to do. There is little room to breathe, and, in fact, I needed to fly with an oxygen tank on the flight over from New York to Istanbul two weeks earlier.

But as we visit sites like the Temple of Artemis, the goddess of love at Ephesus, and the House of the Virgin Mary on Mt. Koressos, where Mary is believed to have gone after the Crucifixion, something is shifting. The stays around my heart are loosening, and I can feel it beating…with love. Love for my friends, for myself, and for my husband at home, who resents that I am healing elsewhere.

Leaving New York, I was furious. How could Allen want to deny me the chance to travel to a place that might help support my recovery? He was being selfish. I was right, he was clearly wrong. But each day, grounded in this ancient land, softens my self-righteous ire. As I float on my back, I recognize that this illness, which has torn through my body, has ripped at our marriage as well, altering the robust life we had been living. An ocean away, I can hold that perhaps he feels abandoned by my seeking help elsewhere, or impotent in his inability to support me on his own.

My heart is open when, after showering, I pick up the phone and call home, yearning to connect from this open place I’ve found.

“Allen, how are you?”

“Fine.”

After a few inane niceties, I can’t stand it anymore.

“I’m wondering if we could talk about what’s going on. I know this trip has been hard for you.”

“I don’t want to speak about it. Look, this call is expensive, and it’s late here. I’ll talk to you another time,” Allen says, barely saying good-bye before hanging up.

If he really loved me, he wouldn’t be like this, immediately flits through my brain. My throat closes up, making it hard to swallow. Part of me wants to pick up the phone again and yell at him; another part wants to weep over how my health has become a battleground. Temples throbbing, I start rehearsing what I will say to him next time we speak, constructing an impenetrable wall of defense.

Then, the melodic music from the courtyard drifts in on the breeze through the window. I hear my classmates at dinner, the clinking silverware against the porcelain plates, the tilting laughter in their voices. I take a breath, throw a wrap around my shoulders, and join them, choosing life over righteousness…for the moment.

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I have to get this right. I have to get this right, pulses through my head like a conductorless locomotive. Temples pounding, breathing shallow, I am trying desperately to wrap my mind around my tenth-grade honors algebra homework, the concepts just out of reach.

If I focus harder, I could do this. I pound my fist into my thigh. Rearranging the pencils on my worn dark oak desk just so, three and a half inches from the right edge, helps calm me down a tad. My head bobs up for a second, and I catch a glimpse from my bedroom window at the sun setting over the Hudson River. But I yank my attention back to the dog-eared pages of my textbook before I can soak in the warm oranges, reds, and yellows filling the skyline.

I wasn’t always so driven. The switch flipped when I was seven. Doing well suddenly fell away after my parents’ divorce. Without knowing why, I simply didn’t care about school and loathed homework. Walking down the street, I’d deliberately throw my frayed, aqua blue three-ring binder onto the hard cement so that it would pop open and stomp on my assignments when they flew out into the dirty nearby puddles.

“Did you do your homework?” Dad would ask in his nightly call.

“Yep,” was my short reply, praying he’d move on.

My grades plummeted. But Dad caught on soon. After a parent-teacher conference, he sat me down, his stern voice echoing in my ear, “I’m disappointed. I know you can do better than this. You must always live up to your potential.”

In that millisecond, I spiraled into an unending quest for perfection that ate at my core. I could do better. I would do better.

Now, at fifteen, I’m a relentless taskmaster, nearly panicking at the thought that I might do poorly on tomorrow’s math exam. Hour after hour passes as I practice each equation, checking and re-checking my work until I get every one of them right three times through.

I pause for dinner and then have my brother quiz me until it’s time for bed. I must get this right, continues to jackhammer in my brain. I watch the digital clock flip to 1 am, 2:30 am, 3 am, and sleep briefly from 5 to 6 am.

Third period, Mr. Mandel hands out the mimeographed test, the blue-ink smell permeating the bright white pages. My hand cramps around the pencil as the 45 minutes tick by. My toes clench until I lose feeling in my feet. The bell rings. I stand up, the blood rushing to my head, as it always does after every exam. My relentless self-imposed pursuit of perfection literally steals my breath. Yet I am in its grip and can’t squirm loose even though this one’s over.

The next day, Mr. Mandel walks down the aisle, distributing the tests face down. It hits my desk, and turning it over, a 98 appears. Shit, now I have to get at least this grade on my next test immediately floods my nervous system instead of any relief that I did so well, and dread fills me with all the work still to come.

“How did you do?” Dad asks on the phone that night.

“I got a 98,” I say, glad that at least for now my grade is good.

“So, what happened to the other two points?”

I swallow Dad’s joke, heart sinking, feeling yet again like I’ll never be good enough. If I could just get 100, then I’ll be okay, I tell myself after our call, returning to my bedroom to press into the material for tomorrow’s biology exam.

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“Listen, let me speak with your supervisor.” My heart is racing, and my fury seeps out in my tone, despite trying to keep my anger out of my voice.

Yesterday, checking my monthly statement, I saw that my bank had wired $2,300 to the wrong insurance company straight from my account. Easy fix, I’d thought, I’ll describe what they did, and the bank will reverse the charges.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Remer, but the money was accepted in that company’s account. It’s gone. There’s no way we can retrieve it,” the sixth representative I’ve dealt with tells me.

I try, yet again, “But you didn’t send it to the right company, the one I specified on the form. Again, please let me speak to a supervisor.”

“All right. And thank you for letting me serve you today.”

Serve me? If he’d God damned served me, I wouldn’t still be on hold, I fume as the endless loop of music drones on for five, ten, fifteen minutes.

At 23 minutes, I repeat the situation to yet another supervisor. “What do you suggest I do?” I say, praying that asking him to come up with a solution might work instead of hitting the same roadblocks over and over.

“I can transfer you to the dispute department.”

“I told you and the other supervisors, I spoke to them twice yesterday, and they told me they’d be happy to put in the dispute, but it wouldn’t go through. I got the emails this morning that they rejected my claim.”

“Well then, Ms. Remer, I’m terribly sorry there’s nothing I can do to help you,” he says in an irritatingly even tone.

I want to scream, I’m going to withdraw all my money from the bank! Sweat soaking through my shirt, my body floods with ancient alarms at being powerless. Knowing my puny account wouldn’t make a dent in the long run feeds my rage. I’m no David against Goliath, lacking any sling shot for defense.

“Fine!” I lose it, slamming the phone down after poking my finger at the red button as though it would make a bang in the supervisor’s ear. Tears stream down my cheeks unbidden. It isn’t fair, screams inside my head. It’s just not fair.

I’m usually calm, methodical, and logical when solving problems, not hotheaded. However, I become untethered when I hit a solid, thick wall of corporate defense hiding behind its unyielding might because it doesn’t care; I go ballistic, bursting inside, out of proportion to the situation.

Look, this is hysterical and thus historical, I remind myself, teetering on the edge. Trying to fight for what is right against an immovable force is my childhood. I was incapable of protecting myself against all that felt so out of control.

Remembering this, I consciously breathe slowly and deeply as I pace the room. I am safe. Take it one step at a time. Seeing Sprout, my kitty sleeping serenely, I snuggle up to her, sticking my nose into her soft fur, my cheek feeling her belly rise and fall, removed from the world’s — or at least my worries.

Re-entering my body, my superpower, the ability to “figure things out,” kicks in. I make a plan, feeling my self-agency return. Remembering I have a contact in the bank from years ago, I pick up the phone.

“Hi, this is Roger. I’ll be out of the office until Monday,” his voice mail tells me.

All weekend, I swing between my child and adult selves. The situation sneaks unbidden into my brain during my morning beach walk, at the supermarket while smelling the cantaloupes to pick the ripest one, at the play where, for a time, I lose myself in the performance.

But I stay the course. I hold open the possibility that anything can happen. I hold open the possibility that anything can happen. I repeatedly chant my mantra, leaving space for the universe to solve the problem, each time stitching together a little more strength as I turn over my impotence. This is the action I can take.

“Roger, Hi, I don’t know if you remember me, but I’m calling because I have this problem,” I say Monday morning when he picks up the phone, calmly feeling, somehow, that sooner or later all this will work out.

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“Let’s go into the other room,” Carlos says, slinging his arm over my shoulder and playing suggestively with the strap of my sleeveless shirt.

Sweat starts to pool between my shoulder blades. “Um, okay…” I say more bravely than I feel. Carlos takes my hand to go, but I really wish we could just stay put. With others in the room, he might not expect too much.

Seven years older than me, Carlos, with his long, curly, velvety brown hair cresting in the center, is the epitome of hot. I, at fifteen, am most decidedly not. Long out of high school, Carlos spends his days hanging out, playing the guitar, and recording in the music studio with his Chilean brothers, who, along with him, make up a successful hard rock band. I am one of many groupies. But the other girls are putting out, as the driving rhythms of Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, and Queen fill the air, pushing against my adoration of the uncool dulcet Billy Joel, Barry Manilow, and Elton John.

I try to “should” myself to walk on the wild side, but rebellion is hard. Wild is scary. Wild is out of control. Wild feels dangerous, so I dance with a foot in two camps.

I smoke, taking tokes, but can’t get high; my body fights against my desire to let go. I do, however, follow Carlos out of the room, but in the dark, I give all…except my virgin self. I believe in love, and I know deep down that it’s not what he and I are about. I’m his prize: the good little Jewish girl from the Upper West Side…, and he’s mine—the “bad” boy who runs on the wrong side of the tracks. Carlos is not my destiny, but his desire for me feels like a win against the pounding need in my head for perfect grades, a perfect body, a perfect life.

Time passes. I perfect the role of the good little bad girl, hanging out and shouting out lyrics to songs I start to know by heart. “Stairway to Heaven” and “Cold Stoned Sober” become my anthems. My best friend and I follow the band to gigs, screaming from the sidelines like rabid fans. Eventually, though, I can no longer play the game as Carlos wants more and more of a version of me that I am not.

I am not hot and loose. I am not in love, and even at fifteen, I know I can no longer live untrue.

“Carlos, I think this is it,” I say one humid early summer afternoon.

“Okay,” he says, without a moment’s hesitation.

Wow, that was quick, I think, taken aback for a second.

But as I walk out the door, I’m flooded with relief from his willing acquiescence and no longer feeling the need to try and keep him happy, but at arm’s length—or the need to “should” myself into someone I now trust I am truly not.

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“You look ridiculous the way you walk,” Carla snarls as I head back to my office, heat flooding my cheeks.

What are we in grade school? I think simmering, but now wobbly swinging between fury and utter humiliation. As usual, though, when attacked, I freeze, shut down. Ingrained instinct kicks in. Responding will only make it worse, flits through my brain. Be still!

I’ve met bullies before. In the school yard, on the streets, and my childhood home, but at the office, really…and in my late twenties? I thought working in the esteemed museum of high culture in New York would be a refined affair. Everyone would be speaking of Monets, Picassos, Rodins, and Mondrians. However, this bastion of art is no refuge for me.

Carla, jaggedly slim, with short, jet-black hair, and all hard lines, revels in throwing barbs at my tender core. I’d known her before. We’d been in the same internship program together at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She’d been distant, paying me no mind. Now, eight years later and early in our careers, she’s out for blood. I’m the director’s assistant, and Peter and I came in together. He interviewed me after accepting the position but before his official start date.

The education department was a mess when he started. Peter came in guns blazing, brimming with courageous ideas. He solicits the staff’s input, encourages us to stretch ourselves and take on fresh challenges. As newbies, Peter and I bonded, entering this hornet’s nest of an institution, which I soon learn prides itself on being cutthroat. Although I screen his calls, draft his memos, and reconcile the endless budgets for our many education programs, he also encourages me to teach in the galleries, getting people excited about art. I have a talent and, it turns out, a passion for helping folks to open up to novel ways of seeing what is before them.

Peter promotes Carla to head of school programs, and she loves to boast about it over my lowly administrative assistant position. I’m flummoxed as to why she’s so determined to humiliate me at every turn, gnawing away at my sense of self with cutting comments about how I dress, the way I think, and the quality of my work.

I come from a line of fighters, yet Carla disables me, and I retreat, trying to dodge the serrated barbs, all too similar to those that fly out of my mother’s mouth. I’ve cut off from her, trying to heal my adult self, yet clearly, my mother’s doppelganger haunts me at work.

I can figure this out, I reason. I’m not going to let Carla run me out of here.

Over time, she sidles up to Peter’s penchant for having a good time during off hours. They bond on the wild side, and I fall out of his good graces and become the target for his now-unhidden temperamental discontent.

After promising me a promotion, he takes it away. “I’ve changed my mind,” is all Peter will tell me when I ask for the reason why. Bile burns the back of my throat.

My fury finally lights my fire. I hit upon an idea. It’s the mid-1980s, and corporate art collections are popping up all over the news. Their raison d’être, I read, is to enhance the work environment and demonstrate their goodwill toward local contemporary artists. My educator’s mind races—they can’t do that simply by hanging paintings on the wall. They need a translator, someone like me who will help employees appreciate the contemporary work around them and understand that artists are like employees, working with their skills and talents to excel at what they do.

I approach corporations in New York City, pitching what turns out to be a novel idea. Little do I know, no one else is taking this educational approach. One after another turns me down, but the fighter in me keeps going. Finally, Chase Bank bites.

“We’d like you to start right away,” my soon-to-be-boss tells me on the phone as I sit in my office at the museum.

I smile, push back the chair, and stride into Peter’s office. By now, there is no “We’ll miss you.” No counteroffer comes. “Well, I expect two weeks’ notice, at least,” is all I get.

But later, when Carla finds out, she storms into my office. “Hmph. Well, I bet you’re now going to make a lot more money than I. How much are they paying you, anyway?”

I look up, immensely proud to be forging new waters in a career I’m inventing myself, and simply say, “Quite honestly, Carla, that’s none of your business,” and usher her out of the room.

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“Heels down, squeeze with your knees, and trot, please.”

Gay Rhythm, my trim, roan Quarter Horse responds within a beat. Up and down, up and down, I post in sync with her smooth gait, right and left shoulders alternating going forward. Mary Ann, my riding instructor, watches as six of us trot around the ring. Some kids bounce, arms flailing, but feet in the stirrups, I’ve caught the beat of Gay Rhythm’s trot.

Her steady pace is reliable, something to count on. With the sun beating down, Gay Rhythm’s coat is warm as I stroke her shoulder, thanking her for working with me as I learned to ride.

At seven, this is my first year at Camp Taconic, my Berkshire oasis, far from New York and all the change at home.

When I woke up a few months ago, my father explained that Mom had left the night before.

“She is coming back this afternoon,” he said, defeat in his voice. “But I’m going to be leaving. I won’t be living here anymore.”

I’d stared, mute. Dad had told me shortly before, when Amy, my best friend’s parents got divorced, “Don’t worry, sweetheart. That will never happen to us. Mom and I will never leave you.”

“But Dad, but, but, but...” I’d said, my throat closing up, that morning when he told me they were splitting up.

“I love you. That’s never going to change,” he’d tried to reassure me.

Yet things did change. Life was different at home. No more nightly readings of “The Wizard of Oz.” No more kisses on my forehead as I slipped into bed afterward, careful not to knock off any of my dear stuffed animals. No one is saying, “Just like putting a letter in the envelope” anymore.

I am left in the too-hot house, never knowing when one of my mother’s rages will explode into the danger zone of mighty slaps that send me spinning into silence. She doesn’t want my father…nor, it seems, me.

“And walk, please,” Mary Ann calls out now, ending the riding class.

I pull back gently on the reins, careful not to jerk them and risk having the bit cut into Gay Rhythm’s mouth.

“Come into the center of the ring and dismount. Then take your horses into the barn.”

Holding the reins on her neck with my left hand, I swing my right leg over her Gay Rhythm’s back, easily landing on the ground. I flip up the stirrup and loosen the girth holding the saddle in place. She takes a big breath, her sides swelling out, as though letting out of a too-tight girdle. The birds chirp in the distance, and the leaves in the birch trees rustle. Gay Rhythm turns her head to me, gently bumping my shoulder with her soft, velvet muzzle. I run my hand over her nostrils, feeling her almost imperceptible breath, and my heart swells.

This love is simple, reliable. Tomorrow she will be here, and the day after as well…until I have to return home to New York at the end of the summer to the house now empty of a steady force.

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“Your head is keeping you from your heart.”

I burst into tears, ones that dribble into the corners of my mouth. Levent, the Turkish healer who runs the IM School of Healing Arts, isn’t telling me anything I don’t already know. But “knowing” is the problem. And sitting in the downtown, 1990s art-drenched Manhattan loft, surrounded by my friends, I couldn’t feel more alone.

I’ve been battling a complicated autoimmune illness that is violently attacking my digestive, endocrine, and cardiovascular systems. I literally can’t take any nutrients in and am attacking my own heart. The universe is clearly knocking me upside the head. I get that…I understand that. But Levent has been trying to help me connect to a deeper knowing, one inside my heart that bypasses my noisy brain.

Figuring things out has always been my superpower. It protected me in my childhood home, which was anything but safe. Mom needed a confidant. Done. Someone had to be the adult, run the house, and raise my brother? I could do that. You wanted the abuse kept quiet, the insanity at bay? Fine. Navigating the adult world with aplomb gifted me with a strength of mind, and I traveled into adulthood with flying colors on the outside. But the cost was silencing my emotions, all while desperately yearning for connection.

“Close your eyes and feel everyone in the room,” Levent instructs me. “Now open them and look around, slowly.”

The intimacy is almost too much to handle. I feel insanely self-conscious, but I am resolved, and turn from Corinne’s, to Kono’s, to Joyce’s gaze, and onward.

A hiccup of warmth penetrates my frozen being. I slow my breathing and draw my hands to my heart. The slight heat radiating from them begins to burrow through the layered sheaths of protection, a tickle of a feeling that’s just out of reach.

This is silly. All too new-Agey for me, immediately floods my mind.

“Keep going. It’s okay if it doesn’t feel natural,” Levent says, as though hearing the insides of my brain. “Love is your birthright.”

My heart clenches at the words. I go clammy. Unbidden, my biggest fear bubbles up. Perhaps deep down there’s nothing there. Maybe there just isn’t any love within me.

“It’s safe to uncloak with us. We are here to remind you of who you really are,” Levent says, instructing the group to come hold me.

It is this skin-to-skin contact that starts to crack lifelong walls. The trickle of that buried feeling expands just enough to let both my brain and heart know that I am more than my past.

We sit breathing together in this sacred space for what—after a while—feels like too long. But as I grow uncomfortable, I smile instead of recoiling from this dance with my self-doubt, taking a first step on the road to healing my heart.

At twenty-two, I’m hit for the first time with the piercing pain of losing someone I dearly love—my maternal grandfather, David, and it rips my heart apart.

“It’s true. It’s true, Abby. David’s dead!” I hear my grandmother Duds cry wildly into my answering machine when I play the message, having come in from a night out.

Listening again, I can’t quite grasp what she is saying. My small of stature but robust, bombastic grandfather is dead? I won’t ever hear him cry again, “Easy for a Leonardo,” at any of my modest accomplishments? There will be no more gifts of stolen flowers from his beloved Brooklyn Botanical Garden or regaling us with his incomprehensible jokes in Yiddish, which he can’t complete, always breaking down laughing, too hard to reach the punchline. I’ll miss his booming voice singing to whatever grand opera was on the radio or pontificating reverently about the brilliance of Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw.

“He lay down for a nap this afternoon, and I couldn’t wake him,” Duds tells me when I call her back. “Your mother’s on her way out here.”

“I’m coming out,” I assure her from my Manhattan apartment, and hanging up the phone, I call my father.

“I will come pick you up,” my father says instantly.

Although my parents’ acrimonious divorce was fifteen years ago, he and David remained extremely close. With genuine mutual admiration for their sharp minds, they shared a love for the law and erudite culture. But deep down, I want my dad to be there for me when we go out to Brooklyn. I don’t know how far gone my mother will be when I arrive at Duds and David’s apartment. Overly attached to her father, I expect she will be wailing in a drunken state, unmoored from the reality of what needs to be done—the calls to make, the arrangements to handle. But my father will know, and, despite his loathing of my mother’s outbursts, he will do what is necessary. I will be able to dodge my mother’s histrionics behind his voice of reason and calming force.

Twenty minutes later, in the cab, my father somberly shifts in his seat to face me. “Here, take this,” he says, “You’ll need it,” handing me a small white pill and a bottle of water. Without thinking, I swallow it whole.

I know my father means well. He wants the valium to dull my pain, not just for me, but to save himself from my emotions, which he can’t ever bear to handle. And so, I obediently eat my grief this night, a familiar pattern that will take many years to overcome.

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Digging Deep with Abby is for readers and writers who crave authentic reflections about personal experiences. Once a week, you will receive a reflective essay inspired by an evocative prompt, which you can then, should you wish, use to inspire your own writing. Digging Deep encourages us to pause and thoughtfully consider what is happening inside us, even as everything around us swirls about.

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