Chapter 13 - I Had To Stop Asking Whether Grant Loved Ethan
For months, one question tortured me.
How could Grant love Ethan and still do this?
Therapy helped me understand the question itself was wrong.
Love is an emotion.
Safety is behavior.
Responsibility is behavior.
Honesty is behavior.
A person can genuinely love someone and still endanger them through arrogance, denial, selfishness, or fear.
Grant loved Ethan.
I stopped arguing with that fact.
He also ignored a safety warning that protected Ethan.
Both were true.
He also lied afterward.
True.
He also cried at our son’s funeral until he could barely stand.
True.
He also filed a demolition application six hours later.
True.
Human beings become easier to understand when we stop demanding that one truth erase another.
I did not need Grant to be a secret monster.
I needed him to be accountable for exactly what he had done.
That helped me let go of another terrible burden too.
I had spent weeks asking whether I should have noticed Ethan’s symptoms earlier.
Headaches.
Nausea.
Fatigue.
Could I have saved him?
His doctors were kind but firm.
The symptoms were nonspecific.
Children get viruses.
Children become tired.
I did seek medical advice.
I did not know there was an unapproved gas installation behind his wall because my husband told me it had passed inspection.
The responsibility was not mine simply because I was his mother.
Grief always looks for a person to punish.
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Sometimes it chooses the survivor because the dead are beyond its reach.
I spent a long time learning not to volunteer.
