Imagine you are a mother. Imagine you have five children; four of them are boys, bright-eyed, full of mischievous smiles, wanting to be just like Daddy. You love your sons, can't imagine life without them, but you have one daughter and one daughter only.

She has dark hair and big brown eyes ringed by long lashes. She starts giggling and cooing when her face is still a round baby's face with a button nose. She crawls, pulls up unsteadily on furniture, tries to stick her chubby hands into the dog's food.

Before you know it she's talking in full sentences and losing her baby fat. She has a perfect oval face and a smile like sunshine. She runs with her brothers, climbs trees and shoots guns and plays in the mud. They tease her, but they love her fiercely, because she's their only sister.

She's a beautiful teenager. Her skin is fair and her smile still lights up a room. She's smart, too; she has a mind for numbers, so she brings home near-perfect grades in math. You watch her and you're proud, because she is beautiful and intelligent and she has a gentle, loving soul, but there's something in her face that is haunted. Sometimes you notice that her smiles never seem to reach her eyes any more.

You think she's too intelligent and too sweet and too normal to have a problem, but gradually the haunted look grows stronger, the smiles weaker. When you look into her beautiful eyes it's like there's a cavern there, like there's a great vast emptiness in her soul. You want so much to fix her but you don't know how.

She's diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and the doctor prescribes medication for her. You hope that it will make her well, that she'll miraculously go back to being the carefree little girl you remember.

She doesn't, but she doesn't lose herself either. She graduates from high school, and a few years later she gets married. She looks stunning at her wedding, all dressed up in white with a flowing veil covering her curly dark hair, but she doesn't smile. You watch her and wish that she would smile. Her face is too pale and you wonder if she's scared, so scared she doesn't know what to do.

She moves to her own house to build a life and you feel a moment of panic because you can't protect her any more. But you remind yourself that she is a grown woman, that she's stronger than her petite form looks, that she has survived so much already. She gets a job in a town thirty miles away and settles into the life of a newlywed.

A few weeks after her wedding you get a call. It's from your daughter's employer. He wants to know if she's sick. No, you say, and he tells you that she never came in for work.

Something inside you dies right then, because you know. But you keep hoping that she slept late or her car broke down or something, anything. You'll take any explanation, any lame excuse, so long as it comes from your daughter. God, please let her be alive.

Your husband and your sons, the protective loving brothers of your only daughter, go out to look for her. Maybe they know too, because they can't look into your eyes when they leave. Your oldest son is the one who sees the axle sticking up from a gully beside the road.

The steering column wasn't collapsible because she was driving an old car. It crushed her chest. You're glad, later, that you didn't have to see it. Your husband, your daughter's father, tries to give her CPR even though she's already cold. He sobs and sobs and begs her to come back. He knows she's gone, but he wants a miracle, he wants her to sit up and smile at him, he wants her to be okay.

Imagine that you have a daughter with brown eyes and the sweetest smile. Imagine that one day during the summer she is twenty-four, she leaves for work and never comes home.

Imagine that you are my grandmother.