If your mom is dead, is she still your mom? At twenty-five—nearly two decades after losing my mother to breast cancer as a little girl—an accident on a downtown street unleashes startling emotional reactions, and this question starts to percolate. I come to understand what I’m experiencing as long-buried childhood grief. As I marry and become a mother, intense feelings challenge my capacity for self-compassion. Gradually I confronted how growing up surrounded by silence in a family that moved on from sorrow had caused me to suppress my mother’s memory for far too long. Ultimately, after excavating all the layers, I find my mom again, and in the process discover that truth, no matter how painful, heals.