Now, her son calls her a liar, shaking a piece of paper in her face with the results of a home saliva test he took himself.

Unfortunately, it also doesn't guarantee a cure, as I discovered when the doctors gave me the grave news.

Sneering, he backhands her into the dirt, climbing into his beat-up Ford pick-up, and driving off without so much as a word, leaving her broken on the ground.

Anna sits remembering her father's last words, before he took his life, and shudders at how reasonable they now sound.

or disinter her.

Nobody knew his only wish was to stop hurting, and he no longer believed he would ever find another way.

How do I handle a new parent who actually asks me about myself and seems to care?

But one day someone else picked up.

“deadname, come to dinner!” called their mother, as they closed out of the online game, sighing longingly with a single tear in their eye.

My memory, like my heart, had other plans.

There is no life somewhere that I must uncover to become the person I was meant to be because there is only this life, which is unplanned, limited, not completed, and let it belong to me.

For the first time ever, the voices in my head said something positive to me

"Of course she can" It said in a jaunty voice, and printed out a picture of a smiling white child who holding out a glass of water

...by suicide, nine years ago when he was four." -my mother answers the child psychologist.
5 minutes later with the expert, I finally got curious: "What is suicide?"

Nobody asked me for the money and asking 'why' was too risky.

He took comfort knowing that some conditions—mostly cerebral, like Multiple Systems Atrophy, Alzheimer’s, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, the list went on—were untraceable until death.

The next morning, they discovered the letters and realized that the person who had always asked if everyone else was okay had been silently begging someone to ask him the same.

When he learned the picture belonged to a stranger, he threw it away, then spent the night wishing he could throw away his feelings just as easily.

Seeing him now in the morgue makes me wish we'd just gifted him a piece of junk like they did in the old days

Somehow that spark became everything I’d ever wanted, only for me to lose it when I thought it was finally mine to keep.

But humans can't hear ghosts.

My life was spared at the cost of theirs, and everything that I was as a human being.