On New Year’s Eve, my daughter-in-law said I’d be sent to a nursing home because I was useless. I left in tears, sobbing at a bus station—until a young woman listened, then called her father.

I stood in the doorway of the room I’d slept in for twelve years, fingers locked around the handle of a faded floral suitcase that belonged to another era.
It carried the soft scent of lavender sachets, mothballs, and a life that had quietly been taken from me. My hands shook—not because I was seventy-five, and not because last winter’s Parkinson’s scare still lingered in my mind—but because disbelief was vibrating through my bones like a live wire.

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