The Most Important Girl
A Story About What Grandparents Remember, What Little Girls Deserve, and the Toast That Changed Everything
There is a particular kind of grief that does not announce itself.
Not the acute grief — not the grief of the hospital room or the funeral or the weeks immediately after, when the world conspires to acknowledge that something has happened and that you need to be held. The other kind. The grief that waits until you are at a wedding, watching a little girl in a pink dress spin in the church parking lot because her patent leather shoes make a satisfying noise on the asphalt, and then it arrives without warning: the understanding that Phoebe should be here. That Phoebe would have straightened that pink dress and taken fourteen photographs of it and probably cried in the bathroom for ten minutes because her daughter was too beautiful and she was too grateful.
That Phoebe was not here.
That she would never be here for anything, ever again.
I have learned, in the three years since I buried my daughter, to let this kind of grief arrive and then let it pass. You cannot fight it. You cannot schedule it or contain it. You can only feel it, briefly and completely, and then look down at the five-year-old who is spinning on the asphalt and making sounds of delight, and let her become the reason to be present.
Margot had been making everything bearable since the day she was born.
She had also, at age five, recently developed strong opinions about shoes.
These ones are the best ones, she had informed me that morning, holding up the patent leather shoes with the small buckle on the side. They make a good sound.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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