Light a Candle. Strike a match to “Meadow Rain,” the celadon pillar candle you were saving for a special occasion. Relax as the soothing aroma of honeysuckle swirls around you. Muse on a memory of your son, when little, walking in a field of clover where you two imagined you saw little fairies—“lollygaggers”—rise in a mist.

Take a sweet onion in your hand, and marvel at the dry, papery husk. Think of the wings of a dead moth picked up by your broom this morning. Such a powerful force in life, such a fragile creature in death. This could be you. One day it will be.

Rub away the crispy layer, and reveal the smooth, sleek surface. With your sharpest knife, the 8” chef-style, slash in the direction of the grain. The way Jacques Pépin does. Within seconds, your eyes swell and burn. Try not to think of your son again and glance at your phone. Try not to wish he would call. Tears blur, sting, blur again. Remember that you need two chopped onions for your chicken parsnip soup, and the pot is still empty.

Drown it. You’ve heard that cutting an onion under water works. Of course. Water. Tears. Water doused with salt. Think of Shakespeare. Look, they weep, said Enobarbus, who addressed his master in Antony and Cleopatra, as the other servants sobbed before the fateful battle. And I, an ass, am onion-eyed: for shame, transform us not to women.

Wonder why men are ashamed to cry. The last time you saw your son he cried, but he dropped his head and turned away. You yelled at him for not being glad to see you. You treated him like a boy, furious that he still smelled of beer after a late night with friends. He’s 29. He’s old enough to take better care of himself. Why doesn’t he?

Position the knife on the wet onion. It slips and nicks your left thumb. Hold your thumb to your mouth. The cut hurts more than it should. It always does. Wish you could feel your son’s pain. You know he drinks to soften the loneliness of New York City, where he moved to follow his dreams. Be glad you lost it. If you are under control, says the old Zen master, you lose the danger of glimpsing an unknown realm. You are a mother. Know you must always peer into the darkest abyss, eyes wide open. It’s what mothers do. Hold a napkin to your face.

Freeze it. Slip the now ragged onion into the freezer. They say this will lessen the chemical reaction that irritates your eyes. While you wait for it to harden, meditate on the history of the onion, how, like cats, it was revered by ancient Egyptians. A symbol of eternal life, found in the eye sockets of the mummified Rameses. Laugh, thinking of the joke on the tomb robbers. Onions instead of jewels. Wonder what they will find and snicker about when you’re gone. Your first four-leaf clover pressed in wax paper, broken clown toy from your grandfather, clay paperweight made by your son at age five. Cat or dog? Dragon! he shouted.

Think of the sermon from Sunday, how your pastor spoke of the exodus of the Jews in the Bible. How he lamented that everyone glosses over the Book of Numbers because they think it’s just boring old lists. But the words in 11:5 roll like poetry: We remember the fish we ate in Egypt that cost nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. Ponder the fact that your son doesn’t pine for those elaborate dinners with onions and garlic that you cooked for the family. Instead he yearns for that silly tray of Kraft cheese sandwiches, each one cut into four little squares because a gang of eight-year olds invaded your kitchen and you didn’t have enough on hand to feed every little boy a whole sandwich. Laugh. The miracle of the cheese sandwiches.

Take the onion out of the freezer. Put on a mitt. Chop, chop, chop. Sob, sob, sob. Pray, pray, pray. Will it take a miracle to chop two onions?

Wear goggles. Strap on the goggles your husband wears when he runs the belt sander. Tighten the strap. Raise the knife again. Think of the goggles your son wore on the swim team. An expert swimmer, he struggled instead against the riptide of high school. Like you. Think of the times you ached to fit in with the cool crowd. Your envy of the cheerleaders who pranced and chanted with confidence. We ain’t scared and we ain’t cocky, gonna ride over you like a Kawasaki, zoom zoom!

The goggles pinch. Take them off. Reflect on the etymology of “onion.” It’s Latin, from unio, for “one” or “unity.” The root holds the onion together. Remind yourself you must not sever the root or all is lost.

Return to the field of the lollygaggers. Think of your son as he turned his hazel eyes to yours, and recall those seemingly nonsensical questions that you so relished. Where do lollygaggers sleep at night? Is the sun my friend? Remember what he asked you recently, words that could have come from that same child. Are you proud of me? Grope blindly across the counter. Where is the napkin? Find it and press it to your eyes. Forgive your son. Forgive yourself.

Recall what you read in the old farmer’s almanac. The more often you chop onions, the less prone you are to cry. Shake your head. Realize that the more often you experience joy, the more often you will cry. Reach for the phone. Call your son.

Fact: Back when I was growing up, the New Jersey suburbs nestled in the Watchung Mountains had few good Chinese restaurants. We’d order the same two or three dishes: cashew chicken, beef with broccoli, sweet and sour chicken, nothing too spicy, all cloying and overly sauced, and satisfying in their predictability.

The fortune cookies they served us on a tiny black plastic platter alongside the check doled out only career advice, useless to an eleven-year-old in search of answers to life’s juicier mysteries: Who will I marry? Will stirrup pants ever go out of style? Why should I trust a cookie?

Fact: Sydney Omarr wrote astrology books offering 365 targeted, daily predictions, lucky numbers, and colors of the day. My grandmother faithfully purchased the Aquarius one each year. The first section of the book detailed how the reader’s sign interacted with the other eleven signs in various combinations: Parent/Child. Husband/Wife. Boss/Employee. As the only other books Grandma had were a set of World Book encyclopedias and the Bible, I flipped through Omarr’s prognostications when I visited her small home. I’d sit in her narrow, wood-paneled living room under the paintings of JFK and of Jesus. Jesus looked heavenward. Kennedy grinned beatifically at whoever looked at him.

Fact: Whenever my sister or I misbehaved, my mother (Leo) would say, “Such a Pisces” or “There’s the Scorpio.”

“You believe in this?” I asked my mother when I spotted her copy of Omarr’s Leos 1984 on her nightstand. She kept making her bed, the spritz of Opium she’d just applied hanging thick in the air.

“If the moon affects tides,” my mother reasoned, smoothing her bedspread, “is it so hard to believe the stars could affect the fluids in the womb?”

“Then shouldn’t astrology be based on the moon? And on conception, not birthday?” I blanketed my discomfort at a trusted adult’s apparent irrationality with an eleven-year-old’s anger.

My mother smiled tightly and left the room. I thumbed through Omarr’s exploration of Leo mothers and Scorpio children. “Expect a certain amount of conflict.” My mother had underlined that.

Fifteen years later, the day we buried my grandmother, my mother told me and my sister all the signs she was receiving from her mother. Cardinals on a porch railing. Lights inexplicably turning themselves on. My sister nodded and encouraged my mother to go into my details. My mother waited for my reaction. I shrugged and looked down at the table. I’d sat here many times with my grandmother to talk with her about the forgetful details of my life and she would carefully dole out bite-sized morsels of advice. Aquarians are guarded and loving.

My mother locked eyes with my sister and tilted her chin toward me, “She doesn’t believe in this.”

We Scorpios are skeptical and inscrutable.

Fact: My family was never the type to add “in bed” to fortune cookies. I learned that game from a Pisces I dated. He had a thick mop of brown-black curls, a magnetic JFK smile, and eyes that looked heavenward when he made jokes. He knew the best places in Chicago to get Chinese food.

Fact: Astrologically speaking, my sister and I should have gotten along. I should have been loyal, she should have been nurturing. Growing up, she told me she hated me and I tattled on her. My mother told me she didn’t mean it.

Fact: Before a first date with anyone, I checked our astrological compatibility with a schoolgirl’s mooniness. Scorpio and Pisces pairings were supposed to be harmonious, deep, and rich with understanding, my sister and I notwithstanding.

Fact: After sixteen months, my Pisces boyfriend unexpectedly broke up with me over the phone a few weeks after my grandmother passed. For weeks I tormented myself. Could I—should I—have seen this coming when he started talking nonstop about his plucky new boss who had given herself the nickname “Angel” because she was “a gift from God to the company”? She was a fan of his work and insisted they spend a lot of overtime working, often over dinner.

Despondent in a way that can only be hatched from a broken heart, I asked my mother if she believed in curses because maybe Angel put one on me.

My mother shrugged, a perfect mirror held up to a day long ago. “Your grandmother believed in them.” Then, perhaps in a maternal effort to distract me, she told me of the cardinal my sister had seen just that morning, and how much Grandma had been on their minds these days.

There was nothing for me to say.

Fact: Ten years later, after I’d married a nice, even-keeled Libra and had three kids (two Virgos and an Aries), the ex-boyfriend (still a Pisces) tracked me down on social media and, after a few pleasantries, asked me if I even remembered why we’d broken up.

“Because I seem to recall an ultimatum,” he wrote.

“Not from me.” I shot back. “That must have been Angel.” Passionate. Headstrong. Bold. Emotional.

“Maybe.” He backed off. Friendly. Dreamy. “Hey, do you want to grab some Chinese and catch up?”

I wrote. I railed and cursed. I took aim, trying to inflict maximum damage. I deleted and rewrote. “Thanks, but I must decline.” Most Unscorpio-like. Very unsatisfying, but my grandmother would approve. My mother would have encouraged me to tell him to go to hell.

Fact: Sydney Omarr was born Sidney Kimmelman on August 5, making him a Leo. He changed his name based on numerology, perhaps inspired by the Jewish tradition of gematria which assigns numeric value to letters and weaves connections between words with the same sum of letters. Confusing, perhaps futile, but an understandable pastime. What else are a people to do while sitting around on Christian holidays when everything else is closed? Chinese food on Christmas wouldn’t become a thing until 1935.

Fact: My grandmother once told me, “Be careful what you put in writing.”

That morning I sent you a text from the writer’s guild meeting about a one-eyed bookseller who wore an eye patch. He was giving us pointers on cover design so he could sell our books to Walgreen’s, and kept referring to bestselling author Tom Chancy. I knew it would make you laugh. I could hear you laugh.

I can still hear you laugh.

The next day I learned you were gone. Looking at the time of the text, I knew you had never received it. I wondered if the police and paramedics had been there, if they had heard the ding of the text’s arrival.

Amidst texts and phone calls of travel plans and schedules with your friends and family members, I had a filling replaced in a sore tooth. While looking at the x-ray the dentist told me the decay was deep.

“Let me see how it looks when I open it up. I’d like to replace the filling and save the root if possible, instead of going right to a root canal,” he said.

I was up for saving anything that might have a chance of survival.

That night, the novocaine just wearing off, I met your mother and sister at the bar of their hotel. You always wanted us to meet. You said your mother referred to me as your “Library Lady.” Two other friends were there. We drank and talked, about you in our lives and how in one way or another you saved each one of us.

Your sister told of your last days and hours as filled in by employers, neighbors and deputies. Your mother said when she saw the police at her door in Baltimore on that Saturday morning, she knew why they were there.

Two days later, with my tooth sending pulses of heat along my jaw, we put your ashes in the ocean where your mother said you could swim with the dolphins. I wondered if you even liked dolphins. But really, who does not like dolphins? And I smiled, knowing if anyone did not like dolphins it would have been you, and for some very good (and precise) reason.

As the ashes fell heavy out of the box and into the ocean, I knew it was final. I saw what was left of you flowing dryly out of that felt-covered box. You were gone. A sob caught in my throat, a phrase I never understood until that moment. When I felt it.

Like my last text to make you laugh, the filling was too late and a week later it abscessed. By Friday night I couldn’t sleep from the throbbing. By Saturday my jaw felt warm. That afternoon I ran into a friend and started to tell her my tooth woes. She interrupted, told me my jaw was swollen.

I went to the walk-in clinic for penicillin and to find out exactly how much ibuprofen was too much. The swelling continued through the afternoon. When my husband came home that evening he didn’t laugh at me but remarked, “What’d you do to your face?”

We looked in the mirror. I had half a Marlon Brando jawline.

“Too bad it’s not closer to Halloween,” he said.

All bets are off when one’s head starts to swell. Upon seeing me the next day, a holistic, vegan, yoga instructor friend immediately asked, “My god, what antibiotics do they have you on? A lot, I hope.”

After staggering through a few hours of work the following Monday I declared I wanted to go home, to which my boss replied, “Good, it looks like you should.”

That afternoon, back in the dentist chair, I slurred through my pain and showed him my penicillin bottle from the walk-in clinic. He nodded at the dosage and asked if I wanted him to open the tooth up right then for the root canal. When I turned he saw my entire face.

“Okay,” he said. “Why don’t we wait for that to clear up a bit?” He wrote a prescription for more penicillin with an appointment the following week.

In the interim, I took 500 milligrams of penicillin and three ibuprofen tablets every six hours. I shuffled through my days, much like the week after your death, only working as long as I could stand to be around people, then going home to nap on the couch while re-watching Harold and Maude, and Leonard Cohen DVDs. I went to bed early and slept through the night. My infected head distracted me from my broken heart, and I thought I was not so sad anymore, just sick and sleepy.

The following week my dentist said I would also need a crown after the root canal. The tooth was beyond saving. As he prepared the needle, he asked how I was doing.

“The penicillin affected me funny,” I said. “I’ve been sleeping a lot; two or three naps a day before going to bed for eight or nine hours a night.”

“Hmmm,” he dabbed numbing ointment inside the back of my mouth. “That’s not really a side effect of penicillin. Here, you’re going to feel a little pinch,” he warned. I shut my eyes. Then he added, “Maybe you needed the sleep.”

As he cleaned the infection out of my tooth, I thought of a funny text about infectious naps and crowns. Then remembered I could not send it to you.