During the break, she asked me what brought me to the program. I told her about my husband’s illness, the last months before he died, the way that community support had made those months survivable, and how I had wanted to give back to the kind of network that had held us up. She listened without performing sympathy, which was the right response. She said her son had gone through his own period of needing support, some years back, and that she understood.
We talked for another few minutes. Somewhere in that conversation I mentioned Paige, the way you mention your children when you are getting to know someone and the conversation is warm enough for it. I said I had a daughter in her early thirties who worked in communications, and I mentioned her by name, and I took out my phone because I had a photo I was fond of from a hiking trip the previous fall.
Ruth Lawson looked at the photo.
She looked at it for a moment in the particular way that people look at something when they are managing an internal response.
Then she said, very carefully: “This is your daughter?”
“That’s Paige,” I said. “Paige Mercer.”
A pause.
“Paige Lawson,” Ruth said. “My daughter-in-law.”
## The Fellowship Hall
We stared at each other for a moment.
I know what I looked like in that moment because I was very aware of my own face, aware that Ruth Lawson was watching me as carefully as I was watching her, aware that we were both doing rapid calculation about what the other person knew and what it meant that we were standing here saying these words to each other.