I’ve thought about whether Vanessa understood this — that the amendment wasn’t taking something from her so much as naming something for me. I don’t know. The math made it visible, eventually. Whether it changed anything about how she felt, I can’t say.
## What I Told My Therapist
I’d been seeing a therapist for about two years before my father died. Not because of a crisis, particularly — more because I was thirty-three and had accumulated enough unexamined material that I thought some examining would be useful. She was a practical, intelligent woman named Claire who didn’t let me get away with the particular rhetorical moves I make when I’m avoiding something.
I told her about the reading and the missing page in the session following the funeral week. I told it in the order it happened, which took most of the session.
When I was done, she said: “What’s the feeling, when you imagine Vanessa making that decision?”
I’d been expecting her to comment on the situation, on whether what Vanessa had done was intentional. Instead she went somewhere internal.
“Tired,” I said, after thinking about it. “I feel tired. Not angry in the way I expected to.”
“What about sad?”
“Yes,” I said. “But the sad is mostly about Dad, not her.”
“Can you separate those?” she said.
That was the question I sat with for months. Whether the two griefs — my father’s death and my sister’s action — could be separated. They’d happened in the same week, had the same cast of characters, involved the same set of documents. But they were different. My father’s death was not something anyone had done to me; it was something that had happened. What Vanessa had done was different in kind.