There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes not from being alone but from knowing exactly whose absence you are feeling.
I had lived with that loneliness for 15 years, and I had gotten very good at arranging my life around it the way you arrange furniture around a hole in the floor — carefully, methodically, and always aware of where it is.
My name is Eleanor, and I am 58 years old.
I live in the same house I raised my daughter in, on a quiet street in a town that has changed considerably less than I have over the past decade and a half.
The neighbors know me as the woman with the garden, the one who brings food to the church sale, waves from the porch, and seems, from the outside, to have a life that holds together reasonably well.
What they don’t know, what I have never told anyone in full, is that I have not spoken to my daughter Clara since she was 18 years old.