I am the woman I grew to be partly in spite of my mother and partly because of the extraordinary love of her best friends and my own best friends' mothers and from surrogates many of whom were not women at all but gay men. I have loved them my entire life even after their passing.
But for me it is when a student has died. I find the death of a young person the most difficult and painful of times. To explain it to other young people to see a bright future snuffed out is just awful. I am haunted by those deaths.
