Word Processing

When I was little, unable to touch type but keen to look as if I could, I’d smack wildly at the keyboard of our family computer, littering the screen with nonsense. That’s how it felt working on the first chapters of my second memoir. I wrote while only half conscious from exhaustion, my mind a gaping wound, because my older sister, Meghan, was lying in hospice and was comforted by the sound of fingers striking a laptop’s keys. It was one comfort I could offer. Also, I had promised her — pinky promised this thirty-seven-year-old woman — that I would write the story of our sisterhood. That promise consumed me; it gave me something to focus on beyond the hospice door.

In the immediate aftermath of Meghan’s death, I took a few months’ break from writing (being an executor is endless, painful work), and then I dug back into the manuscript to help process the grief. After countless...