What Sophie Knew
At sixty-three, I believed I had already faced every kind of fear life could produce. I had lived through layoffs and long stretches of debt, through hospital waiting rooms at three in the morning, through the grinding uncertainty of wondering whether the next month would hold together or come apart at the seams. Fear, over those years, had become something almost manageable.

Not comfortable, but familiar. Something you learned to carry the way you learned to carry bad knees or a bad back, adjusting your gait, compensating, moving forward because stopping was not a serious option. That understanding was, as it turned out, dangerously incomplete.

It shattered on a cold October morning in Vancouver, in a car parked outside an airport terminal, when my eight-year-old granddaughter said four words that changed the shape of everything. The morning had looked entirely ordinary. The kind of morning October in Vancouver specializes in, the trees along the boulevard dressed out in gold and rust, the air carrying that particular sharpness of cedar and coming rain, the sky a pale, considered gray that could resolve into sunshine or a downpour with equal probability.

I had driven Margaret to the airport for what she called a wellness retreat. Five days in Kelowna. Yoga, hiking, hot springs.

She had been talking about it for weeks with a quiet enthusiasm that I now recognized as the enthusiasm of a person looking forward to something other than what they were describing. She barely looked at me when she got out of the car. “Don’t forget to water my orchids,” she said.