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H ow do you apologize to someone who cuts off all contact someone who is consumed with anger at your actions and feels betrayed someone you love and will always love?

As a child I did the only thing possible. Each day after school I would stand outside her house and wait hoping that I would be allowed back in to make my peace. I would walk the crazy paving that had been laid when I was a child. Then it had been a game to avoid the cracks; now I was trying to repair the cracks in our love.

Day after day week after week I would stand outside her house watch and wait for a sign to show I was forgiven. Autumn leaves collected in corners. Scooping up a handful I allowed them to waft through my fingers a cloud of pleading. Winter was bitter. I left footprints of love that were ignored.

It took me a long time to choose just the right card for her birthday. All that day I kept patting my pocket reassuring myself it was still there. As I stood there the warmth of the sun on my back I visualized the door opening. I would be ushered inside and… I pushed the card through listened to the sound as it hit the wooden floor — heard no response not even the tread of footsteps. She knew I was there but no one dared invite me inside. No one dared go against her word.

I was a child who never fit into a society where the normal family was one father one mother two children. We were one father one grandmother four siblings and an assortment of aunts who we called “the aunts.” My mother had succumbed to polio after five days’ illness leaving four children — I at seven the oldest — my devastated father and her grieving mother my grandmother.

In those days death meant all vestige of previous life was hidden away deep within drawers or sealed cardboard boxes pushed to the back of wardrobes to gather dust. I was never told my mother had died — and I never asked where she had gone. With the hindsight of time it was I realize now the way they coped with tragedy. I never even questioned when we moved in with my grandmother to her new house.