I brought a homeless young mother and her baby home because she looked just enough like my dead daughter to make me stop walking. The next morning, I stepped into the guest house with breakfast and found something that left me standing there in shock.I’m 58, and three years ago I buried my only daughter.Now I live alone in a house that is too large and too quiet.There is a guest house at the back of the property. No one lives there. No one visits long enough to need it.Three years ago, my daughter died after a sudden illness. I was there through all of it. The hospital. The silence after the doctors stopped pretending. The funeral. I was the one who brushed her hair and chose her dress and stood there doing the last things a mother should never have to do.

It does not.It just teaches you how to speak around it.That afternoon I was walking home from an exhibition downtown. I could have called a car, but the weather was warm and bright, and for once I thought maybe walking would do me good.And for one terrible second, my heart stumbled.That was when I saw her.She was sitting on the sidewalk near a pharmacy, holding a baby against her chest. Young. Thin. Exhausted. Her clothes were dirty at the hems, but the baby was clean and wrapped carefully. That detail mattered to me. Whatever else was wrong, she was trying.And for one terrible second, my heart stumbled.Because she looked like my daughter.I knew perfectly well my daughter was dead. I had buried her. But there was something in this young woman’s face that caught me so hard I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk.