In the end, love is all that matters.

As a small girl walking the lanes of the Isle of Man with my father, I said to him once that we were always looking out. I meant it as a child means a thing, half observation, half question. He laughed and said yes. The looking-out has shaped almost everything. It shaped the way I came to know my mother, who I watched for fifty years before I understood what I was seeing. It shaped the way I came to know my own children, both of whom turned out to be people I had not quite expected. It shaped the way I came to know the small island I am from and the two large countries I have lived in since. It also shaped what I missed. I have come to think of attention as the foundation of love, that you cannot love what you have not seen, and so I have had to reckon, in the years of writing this book, with what I did not see in time. I did not see Lily for who she was when she was very small. I made mistakes I am still uncomfortable to read. The mistakes did not go away because she came out, and the years did not return. But the relationship did not end where the mistakes happened. There has been so much after them. The daughter I had not seen as a small child became, in the years after she told us who she was, the closest person to me in the world. The work of love does not end when we have failed at it. It continues, and sometimes it returns to us what we thought we had lost.

I was born on the Isle of Man. The island shapes you before you know it is doing so. It teaches you the closeness of a community that knows everyone's business, the inescapability of being known, the comfort and the constraint of belonging somewhere small. I left in my early twenties, for college but returned leaving only later in middle age to live in the United States, ultimately leaving here along with my husband and children to move to Canada some nine years later. These moves created more places that we would call home. We live in Ontario now, in a city. I have weathered these winds of change along with my husband our children, together. Isaac and Lily are now grown. Lily is married. My parents are gone. What I want, if I want anything from the writing of this book, is for it to be useful to someone. I do not mean useful in the way self-help books are useful, with instructions and arguments. I mean useful the way a sentence can sit with you for a year and then return when you need it. I have spent my life paying attention, and what I have noticed, more than anything, is that the people I love are not finished, and neither am I. We are still becoming. There is more time than I had let myself believe. If you have arrived here through “I’ll meet you there”, or through something else of mine, thank you for being here. I write occasionally, with care, and never about anything I have not lived with for a while. The newsletter is the most reliable way to follow what I do next.