My daughter died suddenly in 2023, at age fifty-three, of a brain hemorrhage. I scattered some of her ashes in Lassen Volcanic National Park, a place I had backpacked into and birded for forty years-my daughter had been there with me-that burned in 2021. Since my daughter's death, I have felt, at times, that too much of what I loved was gone. The psychologists now say the last stage of grief is not acceptance, but meaning. I'm still working on it.
