Michael used to say that Lily got her stubbornness from me and her heart from him, and I used to tell him he had it backward, and we would argue about it in the comfortable way of people who have been together long enough that arguing about something is another form of affection.
He has been gone for four years, and I still argue with him sometimes, in my head, when Lily does something that is so entirely both of us at once that I cannot separate the strands. I will think, Michael, you see that, and then I will think, yes, you do see it, and the conversation will go on for a few minutes in the particular way that grief reshapes itself over time, from something sharp to something that lives alongside you like a companion who is very quiet and sometimes speaks.
Lily was twelve when he died. This is the fact about her life that I think about most, not because twelve is a tragic age for loss, though it is, but because twelve is the age when you are beginning to understand yourself, and Lily has done all of that understanding with a gap in the picture. She has become herself in the shape of that absence in the way that a tree grows around a fence, incorporating what cannot be removed rather than pretending it is not there.
She is sixteen now, and she is, in the most complete sense I know, herself.
Michael was a high school English teacher for twenty-two years, in the same district where Lily attends school now, which means she has teachers who taught under her father and who sometimes say things to her like your dad would have loved the way you think about this, which she receives with the practiced equanimity of someone who has been receiving such things for four years and has developed a relationship with them that is not grief and not dismissal but something in between. She takes them in and files them and does not make a production of it.
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