I had a preoccupation as a little girl that people around me would die. Actually, it wasn’t about people around me, it was my mom; I actively worried that I would lose her. There are moments when the pangs of fear that I would feel come back to me, not as fear of losing her now, but that very raw feeling of being 8 and afraid that she’d be swallowed up by something and be out of reach to me. I think it was in that time, in those moments in our house on the hill, the twists of brown and gold rug beneath my feet and the weight of fearing my mom’s death all around me, that I developed my tendency to say…