I’m forty-six, and two years ago my life stopped at 9:47 p.m., when police at my door told me a drunk driver had killed my husband and our two kids. Since then I moved through life like a ghost—eating because I had to, sleeping because time pushed me forward. We were an ordinary, happy family: Mark, who once set off a college fire alarm trying to cook eggs; Josh, sixteen, lanky and secretly sweet; Emily, fourteen, always reading. Our kitchen table still holds crayon marks and coffee rings like proof life once lived here. They were just going to pick up pizza. I heard sirens and assumed someone else was having a terrible night—until the knock came.
After three closed caskets and too many condolences to bear, the world went silent. I lived in rooms that held memories like bruises. A year later, unable to breathe inside my own house, I took a bus downtown. On a bulletin board was a flyer: HALLOWEEN COSTUME DRIVE—HELP OUR KIDS FEEL SPECIAL. I went home and unearthed the bin of my kids’ costumes—Emily’s bumblebee wings, Josh’s tiny firefighter jacket. They shouldn’t sit in a box. They should be worn.
I donated everything, then bought more costumes and filled my car. The shelter invited me to their party. I almost didn’t go. There, a little girl in Emily’s bumblebee outfit ran to me. “Thank you! I always wanted to be a bumblebee!” Then, quieter: “Maybe you could be my mom?” Her name was Mia. She had been abandoned, too. Fear and grief wrestled with something new—a spark. I asked about adoption the next morning.
Six weeks later, she ran into my arms yelling, “You came back!” Now Mia is eight, loud and glitter-covered and alive in all the ways my house had forgotten how to be. Grief still lives here, but so does laughter. My life didn’t end. It waited. And a little bumblebee showed me how to begin again.