I was not dead. I was never dead. I was just, for a period of eighteen months, unknown.
Being known is what I wanted. Not acknowledged — acknowledged has a passive quality, the granting of permission to exist. Being known is active and mutual: the ongoing process of two people seeing each other as they actually are.
My daughter is beginning to know me. I mean that in a specific sense: she is beginning to know the actual Helen Mercer, the fifty-nine-year-old kitchen supervisor who built a community meals program and has strong opinions about stuffing and who loved Carl for twenty-six years and who has been sitting in her kitchen alone on Tuesday evenings waiting for the phone to ring with a call that meant she was part of someone’s actual life.
That call comes more often now.
It is not everything I hoped for, not the full and easy closeness that some mothers and daughters have, not the relationship we might have had if different choices had been made at different times. It is the relationship that is available to us now, with the history we have between us, and it is real, and real is more than I had six months ago.
I will take real.
## Ruth’s Question, Months Later
In December, at the last community meals planning meeting of the year, Ruth asked me a question I had not been asked before.
She asked: “If you could go back and change the order of things — if you could have met Andrew before the dinner, properly, through Paige — do you think you would have wanted to?”