Three months before she died, she told me she wouldn’t be around much longer. At first I was incredulous. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to believe that she could die, rather that I actually didn’t believe that she would die. “Those types of things don’t happen to people like me,” I thought. Not that I knew who they happened to. I cried when I learned that her illness was terminal. I think the idea of her dying made me sadder than any understanding of what it would actually mean to not have her around.