The thing I have not told anyone, until now, is what happened in the three weeks between my wedding and her death. Graham and I went on our honeymoon. When we got back, I went to see her. I sat by her hospice bed for forty-five minutes. She was on morphine. She was lucid. She did not apologize. She did not say she loved me. She said, "You look tired. You should see someone about that." Those were, quite literally, the last words my mother ever said to me. Not "I'm sorry." Not "I love you." Not "I'm proud of you." Not even "goodbye." An insult. A final, surgical insult. I stood up. I kissed her forehead. I said, "Goodbye, Mom." And I walked out of that hospice and I drove home to Charleston, and I realized, with a kind of quiet clarity I had never felt before, that I had made the right choice. She would have done the same thing on my wedding day. She would have spent her last breath trying to wound me. And I had, by not giving her the chance, protected the one thing she had never been able to steal from me: the memory of the happiest day of my life.