So, I did. I grieved for her and for myself; I wept and wept until I’d made myself a snotty, teary mess on our patio in the winter dusk. I wiped my eyes on my sleeve.

“Mom?”

“Yes, honey,” she said, her hologram looking at me in the evening light.

“I’m so happy you’re back.”

That winter, I became aware of life again. Mom, in her death, was helping me understand that everyone carried around an inner world they never shared. Me, Theo, Nin, Dad—we all kept secret lives. But with Mom there was no hiding and no fear. Her death had liberated a kind of truth between us, and within that openness Mom told me more about herself. How, long before my father, she’d ridden horses in Mexican canyons and sat beneath desert stars listening to the sound of blazing saguaro and coyotes baying with chilling howls. She’d met a man there, a young ranchero, who’d saved her from a flash flood in the middle of a thunderstorm as the water ripped through the Sierra Madres. All of it sounded wild and beautiful. There was a passionate earthiness to my mother that was so distant from the Midwestern housewife I’d known.

We were driving back from getting groceries, making our way up Arapahoe toward the mountains. Mom was sitting in the empty seat beside me, watching thick snowflakes fall against our windshield, layering the streets white. It felt like the first flurries of a big storm, the kind that quietly piles up overnight and transforms Boulder into a city of igloos by morning. I watched her out of the corner of my eye, realizing I’d never really known who she was when she was alive. Mom’s life was filled with romance and passion—things clearly integral to who she was. Why, of all the people in this world, did it seem like I knew nothing about her? Hadn’t she ever planned to share those stories with us? I asked her.

“You were busy with your own lives,” she said. “You didn’t have time for stories about my romantic adventures! Then you were in college, and grad school, then building a life with Theo and the kids.”

“But why didn’t you just tell me anyway?” I asked.

“Honey,” she said and lit a cigarette in the car. “You never seemed that interested in my life.”

And, for the first time, I understood that I hadn’t been.

III.