In this, I am not alone. There are many other people who hate this picture; however, those people are not my people. Unlike all the other haters, I do not think this photograph is “immoral,” or “pornographic,” or “exploitative.” I do not think Lillian was “wicked,” “depraved,” or “an abomination under God.” I do not think I was “abused,” “neglected,” or “manipulated.” When I think of all the people who said those things—in newspapers and on TV, in court, and to my mother’s face and mine—I want to hurt them, which is progress. For a long time, whenever I thought of those people, I wanted to hurt myself.

My hatred is unique. I hate this picture because I hate my worried expression as I hold the glass. I hate Lillian’s weak smile, which is solely for my benefit and only makes things worse. I hate the hollows beneath Lillian’s eyes. I hate the matching paleness of her skin and the bedsheet, which makes the stain between her legs even scarier.

This is a sad picture, I told my mother when she showed it to me, and she agreed. She didn’t look very good in it, I said. Probably it shouldn’t be in the show. Why? my mother wanted to know. Because she didn’t look good or because it was sad? Because she was bleeding, I said. People shouldn’t see her bleeding: it was yucky and embarrassing. Embarrassing for who? For you? she wanted to know. Yes, I said, but also for her.

My mother didn’t answer right away. We kept staring at the photograph.

I’m not embarrassed, she said after we’d looked a little longer. People bleed sometimes. She liked this picture because it showed a difficult part of life in a way that was honest.

As we studied the photograph some more, I remembered the dead feeling in my stomach that morning, when I realized my mother was too weak to take the glass of milk from my hand. I remembered sitting on the edge of the bed and holding the milk below her mouth. All she had to do was reach up a little with her hand to hold the glass but even then, the milk dribbled from her mouth and onto her chest. This made the deadness in my stomach fill my whole body, so big and deep and dark that for a while I couldn’t breathe. Then I remembered how, for the three days my mother had been in Grete’s bed, no one—not me, not Kaja, and not Grete—had ever talked about what was happening to her.

Let’s put the picture in the show, I said.