In the final few years of my mother’s life (she died in 2008) I was living across the country, but visited her three times a year. Inevitably, at some point in these visits, we would go out to dinner, or be waiting for a bus, and my mother would end a lull in the conversation by saying, “I saw that story on the news about that woman who killed her children… it reminds me of when you were little.”
