"I’m too far gone for prayer never mind a holy medal"

I’M COUNTING down the days until my trip to Notre Dame University, Indiana, where I’m to attend my son’s graduation.

My heart is full of excitement, but it’s being squished right down to the bottom of my ventricles by a fear that I might not make it; my daughter’s recovery from neurosurgery has followed an eventful course — much like crossing a high, long bridge that some hellish fiend has constructed, incorporating hidden trapdoors where you least expect them, through which you fall without warning, so fast that you go down without touching the sides.

I don’t want to leave my husband and children in Ireland to fall down a trapdoor without me. I wouldn’t want to fall down one without them; at least when we fall, we fall together. It makes all the difference, that.