Not gratitude for what Paige had done. Not gratitude for the lie or the exclusion or the missed wedding or the eighteen months of being a ghost in my daughter’s married life. Those are not things I am grateful for.
Gratitude for what the exposure of the lie had made possible. For Andrew, who texted me the previous Tuesday to ask my opinion on something entirely unrelated to the family situation. For Ruth, who saved my number in her phone under my first name within a week of meeting me. For Paige, who told a true story at Thanksgiving and did not flinch.
For the community meals meeting on a November Thursday, where I was alive and present and working alongside a person I was glad to know.
## The Thing About Being Dead
People say it metaphorically all the time. She’s dead to me. I was ghosted. We don’t talk anymore.
I was actually dead. Not metaphorically, not as an expression of relational distance, but as the stated fact in the story of my daughter’s life as she had told it to the people who mattered most to her. Helen Mercer, deceased. Both parents gone. No one left.
There is something about having been dead that clarifies your thinking about what being alive means.
I am fifty-nine years old. I work a job I find meaningful. I have a close friend who tells me the truth. I have a community I have built over fourteen years of consistent work. I have a daughter who is trying, imperfectly and genuinely, to be in an honest relationship with me. I have a son-in-law who calls me Helen and who sends me articles and who made a phone call about a grant because he wanted to contribute to something I care about. I have a woman named Ruth who finds me interesting and useful and who I find interesting and useful in return.