A week after my father died, 
suddenly I understood 
his fondness for me was safe—nothing
could touch it. In that last year, 
his face sometimes brightened when I entered the 
   room, 
and his wife said that once when he was half asleep
he smiled when she said my name. He respected
my spunk—when they had tied me to the chair, that
   time, 
they were tying up someone he respected, and when
he did not speak for weeks I was one of the
beings to whom he was not speaking, 
someone with a place in his life. The last
week he even said it, once, 
by mistake. I walked into his room and said
“How are you,” and he said, “I love you
too.”From then on, I had
that word to lose. Right up to the last
day, I could make some mistake, offend him, and with
one of his old mouths of disgust he could
re-skew my life. I did not think of it much, 
I was busy wiping his face and holding 
his cup and touching his shoulder. 
But then, a while after he died, 
I suddenly thought, with amazement, he will always
love me now, and I laughed—he was dead, dead!

- Sharon Olds