Tending

A Companion Piece to “What is a Mother Without Children?”

You want to know how this museum works.

You want to know when I built each room, whether this building is real or imagined, what my medical history entails, how many years I tried, whether I’m married, if I have a name beyond “curator.” You want timelines and treatments and turning points. You want the moment I moved from acceptance to rage, the day I realized the Room of Rage was necessary, the exact hour I understood I am a mother.

You want answers that would make my grief make sense.

I’m not going to give them to you.

Some questions are meant to live unanswered. Some mysteries are more sacred than their solutions. If I gave you dates and details, you’d make me a case study. You’d reduce this museum to autobiography. You’d try to map your own grief onto mine like tracing paper, looking for where our losses align.

But grief isn’t a map. It’s a building that grows in the dark, that adds rooms when you’re not looking, that houses things you didn’t know you were carrying.

Instead, let me show you something else. Let me show you what it takes to tend a museum like this. Let me show you the people who help me keep these rooms alive.

Maybe that will answer something. Maybe it won’t.

The Price of Admission

She arrives at 9:47 AM asking about the admission price.

I’m wiping down the glass cases in the Archive of Inherited Wisdom when I hear her voice echo through the Foyer of Questions. “Excuse me? How much does it cost to enter?”

I set down my cloth and walk back through the galleries, my footsteps creating a rhythm I know by heart. When I reach the Foyer, she’s standing under the silver letters that ask What is a mother without children?, looking uncertain, her purse already open.

“There’s no admission fee,” I tell her.

“Really? Nothing?”

“The museum is free.”

She closes her purse, but her face shows confusion rather than relief. “That seems… unusual. For something this—” She gestures around at the marble floors, the high ceilings, the careful lighting. “This must cost a lot to maintain.”

I don’t explain. I never explain. Instead I ask, “Is this your first time dealing with loss?”

The question catches her off guard. “I— Yes. Six months ago. We stopped trying.”

Six months. I make a mental note. She’ll see some rooms but not others. She’s not ready for everything yet, and that’s okay. The museum will show her what she can handle.

“Take your time,” I tell her. “Walk through at your own pace. I’m here if you need anything.”

She nods and moves into the Tender Galleries, where the lighting is warm and golden, where the exhibits speak of substitute loves and channeled energies. Safe rooms. Comfortable rooms. Rooms that won’t break her.

Three hours later, a man enters asking the same question.

“How much to get in?”

“There’s no cost.”

“What’s the catch?”

I study him for a moment. There’s something hard in his eyes, something that recognizes rage when it sees it. “No catch. How long have you been carrying what you’re carrying?”

“Twelve years.” His voice is flat. “IVF failed four times. My wife left me because I couldn’t give her kids. I’m not here to feel better. I’m here because someone told me this place doesn’t bullshit people about grief.”

Twelve years. I nod slowly. “The museum will show you what you need to see.”

He walks past the Tender Galleries without stopping. I watch him move through the Archive quickly, barely glancing at the glass cases. He pauses in the Hall of Melancholy, his shoulders tensing. Then he continues to the Memorial Garden, where he’ll sit for a while.

And later—if he’s ready—he’ll see the door to the Room of Rage. I’ll make sure it appears for him.

By evening, seven people have asked about admission. None of them understand why there isn’t a price. They keep expecting a catch, a donation box, a suggested contribution sign.

But there is a price. They just don’t know they’re already paying it.

The cost is being here. The cost is naming what brought them. The cost is being willing to walk through rooms that might break them open. The cost is measured in vulnerability, not dollars.

I could tell them this, but I don’t. Some things people need to figure out on their own.

The Curator’s Night

After the last visitor leaves at dusk, I lock the front doors and walk back through every gallery, turning off lights, checking windows, straightening exhibits. It’s a routine I’ve done for years, a closing ritual that grounds me.

When I reach the Memorial Garden, I find something left on one of the benches: a small envelope with no name on it. Inside, a note written in shaky handwriting:

Thank you for not charging money. I couldn’t have afforded it. But I could afford to tell you why I came. That felt like enough.

I fold the note carefully and add it to a drawer in my office where I keep dozens of others like it. Evidence that the price system works, even if no one understands it.

The museum is dark now except for the security lights that cast long shadows across marble floors. I should be tired—it’s been a long day, seven visitors, each one needing something different from these rooms—but I’m not ready to sleep yet.

I walk to the Gallery for Visitors, where I keep a blanket folded over the back of one of the comfortable chairs. I’ll sleep in here tonight. The room is gentle, quiet, the windows looking out on the Memorial Garden where moonlight touches the fountain.

Some nights I sleep here. Other nights, other rooms. It depends on where I need to be, what I need to feel. The museum accommodates all of it because the museum is me, and I am it, and there’s no separation anymore between curator and collection.

I built this place around myself. I didn’t move in—I just finally gave my grief an address.

The Garden

The Memorial Garden requires daily attention.

You’ve walked through it—the stone benches, the fountain that runs continuously, the plantings that tell the story of a year in grief. Spring bulbs pushing through frozen ground. Summer roses blooming in extravagant abundance. Autumn leaves releasing without resistance. Winter evergreens enduring through the darkest months.

What you didn’t see: someone tends this chaos. Someone keeps the seasons cycling. Someone makes sure the fountain keeps flowing and the benches remain clean and the soil stays rich enough to hold both death and life.

Her name is Sarayu.

You might have seen her if you lingered in the garden long enough. She moves like wind through the plantings—always in motion, impossible to pin down, somehow both present and untouchable. She has a key to the museum, though I don’t remember the day I gave it to her. I just remember realizing one morning that she was already here, had always been here, would always be here.

She tends the garden because gardens are fundamentally about chaos becoming order. About things dying and coming back. About the mess of grief composting into something that can sustain new growth.

I find her there most mornings, her hands in the soil, her presence steady as breath.

“The roses need deadheading,” she says without looking up. “And you need to eat something.”

This is how she works—tending the garden and tending me in the same motion, as if there’s no difference between the two. As if I am also something growing wild that needs attention. As if I am also something dying and coming back.

“I’ll eat later.”

“Please eat now.” She stands, brushes dirt from her hands, produces an apple from somewhere. “The garden isn’t the only thing that needs tending.” She says smiling at me. 

You want to know how the seasons exist simultaneously in this garden. You want to know if it’s metaphor or a miracle. But watch Sarayu move through the plantings and you’ll understand: some people just know how to tend chaos. Some people can hold spring and winter in the same breath and make it look effortless.

She’s been here since—I don’t know. Since before I realized I needed her. Since the museum was just rooms full of my grief and not yet a space for anyone else’s. She appeared the way wind appears: suddenly present, impossible to trace to a source.

“Why do you do this?” I asked her once.

She looked at me with eyes that held something ancient and playful at once. “Because the garden grows whether you tend it or not. I just help it grow in the direction it’s meant to go. Same with you.”

I’ve stopped asking questions she won’t directly answer. I’ve learned that Sarayu speaks in movements, not explanations. She tends, she breathes, she keeps things alive. That’s answer enough.

But there’s something else about her I’ve noticed over time. When I’m stuck—truly stuck, frozen in a room I can’t leave on my own—she’s the one who finds me. Not to pull me out, but to sit with me until the “stuckness” passes. To remind me that I’m not the room I’m trapped in. To whisper that breath moves, and so can I.

She moves me when I cannot move myself. Not by force. By presence. By being the wind that stirs what has gone still.

The Structure

The museum is a building, which means sometimes things break.

A door hinge loosens. The fountain mechanism clogs. Floorboards warp in the Hall of Melancholy where so many tears have fallen. The marble in the Foyer develops hairline cracks from the weight of the question etched above it.

These are the times Eli appears.

He’s older than me by a decade, maybe two. Gray at the temples, hands scarred from years of building things that last. He has a key to the museum, and he uses it in the early morning hours when no visitors are here, when the building is just a building and not a metaphor.

You want to know who built this place. You imagine I did it alone—conceived it, designed it, constructed it brick by brick through sheer force of will and accumulated grief.

But buildings don’t work that way. You need someone who understands foundations. Someone who knows that before you can house grief, you need walls that will hold its weight. Someone who can look at your vision and say: here’s how we make this real.

Eli is that person.

“The fountain’s acting up again,” I tell him one morning, finding him already kneeling beside it in the Memorial Garden, tools spread on the ground.

“I know. The pump’s wearing out. I’ll fix it.” He doesn’t look up from his work. His hands move with the confidence of someone who built this mechanism and knows exactly how it fails.

“How did you know it needed fixing? I just noticed it yesterday.”

“I pay attention.” He glances up then, just briefly. “This place makes sounds when something’s wrong. You probably don’t hear them anymore—you’re too close to it. But I built these walls. I know when they’re carrying more than they should…and plus Sarayu tells me.”

This is Eli’s gift: he understands that even structures built to hold grief have limits. That even buildings designed for permanence need maintenance. That foundations, no matter how solid, need someone checking for cracks.

I don’t remember asking him to help me build this museum. I remember standing in an empty field with blueprints I’d drawn in the middle of the night, sketches of rooms for emotions that didn’t have names yet. I remember thinking: this is impossible. I remember him appearing beside me and saying: “Nothing’s impossible. It just requires the right foundation.”

He never asked why I needed to build this. He just asked: “How much weight does it need to hold?”

“All of it,” I said. “Every ounce of what was lost.”

He nodded. “Then we build it strong.”

You want to know when the museum was built, how long it took, whether there were permits and inspections and normal architectural processes. But Eli doesn’t work that way. He builds what needs building. He maintains what needs maintaining. He shows up when foundations crack and he fixes them before anyone else notices they were broken.

“Why do you do this?” I asked him once, watching him repair a structural beam in the Archive that had started to bow under the weight of preserved wisdom.

“Because I helped you build this,” he said simply. “And what you build, you tend. That’s how foundations work—they’re not one-time events. They’re ongoing commitments.”

He has a key because he’s part of the structure itself. Because you can’t separate the builder from what he built. Because even now, years after the museum opened, he’s still building it—one repair at a time, one foundation check at a time, making sure the walls hold.

The Witness

Some visitors freeze in the gaps between rooms.

You’ve seen this if you’ve been here long enough. A woman stands in the doorway between the Gallery of Acceptance and the Room of Rage, one foot in each space, unable to move forward or back. A man sits on the threshold of the Memorial Garden for hours, unable to enter the space of pure grief, unable to return to the safer rooms behind him.

They get stuck in the in-between places, in the transitions where one emotional state is supposed to become another but their bodies refuse to cooperate.

This is when Jesse walks in.

He doesn’t have a schedule. He’s not here every day. But he has a key, and he seems to know—somehow—when someone needs him. When I find a visitor frozen in a gap, when I’ve sat with them for an hour and they still can’t move, Jesse arrives.

He’s younger than Eli, I think, around Sarayu’s age, though with her it’s impossible to tell. He has the kind of face that’s seen things—not hardened by them, but deepened. Made more capable of witness. There’s something in his eyes that says: I know what it’s like to carry something heavy. I know what it’s like to break.

This morning I find him sitting outside the Room of Rage with a woman who’s been in there for ninety minutes. She emerged twenty minutes ago, shaking, eyes red, unable to speak. I was about to go to her when Jesse appeared and sat down beside her on the floor.

He doesn’t say anything at first. Just sits. His presence is steady and unhurried. He’s not trying to fix her or move her along or make her feel better. He’s just there, bearing witness to her breaking.

Finally, she speaks. “I didn’t know I was that angry.”

“Most people don’t,” Jesse says quietly. “Until they’re in a room that gives them permission to be.”

“How do I…” She gestures helplessly at herself, at the museum, at everything. “How do I go back out there? How do I go home and make dinner and pretend I’m fine when I just spent an hour screaming at walls?”

“You don’t pretend.” His voice is gentle but firm. “You go home and make dinner and you’re not fine. And that’s okay. You’re allowed to not be fine.”

“For how long?”

“As long as it takes.” He pauses, and something passes across his face—memory, maybe, or recognition of his own wounds. “I’ve been not fine for a long time. Some days are better than others. But I stopped pretending, and everything got a little easier after that.”

She looks at him then, really looks. “You’ve been through this.”

“I’ve been through something.” His voice is soft, like he’s speaking from a place of deep knowing. “Everyone’s something is different. But yeah, I know what it’s like to stand in a gap and thinking I couldn’t cross it. I know what it’s like to be so angry you can’t see straight. I know what it’s like to carry more than you think you can bear.”

What he doesn’t say—what I’ve come to understand watching him over the years—is that he doesn’t just know these things from observation. He carries scars. Not just the visible ones, but present. He entered the suffering himself, long before he started helping others navigate theirs. Whatever broke him open also broke him toward others. His wounds became his credentials.

They sit together for another hour. Sometimes talking, sometimes silent. And when she finally stands to leave, she looks steadier. Not healed—Jesse doesn’t heal people in that way. But witnessed. Seen. Less alone. And sometimes that’s everything.

You want to know who Jesse is, where he came from, what his story is. You want to know if he lost a child or couldn’t have children or experienced some other denied dream that qualifies him to sit with grieving strangers.

But Jesse doesn’t offer his story as credentials. He offers his presence. He shows up when people are breaking and he sits with them while they break and he doesn’t try to put them back together. He just witnesses. He bears the weight of their pain so they don’t have to carry it alone.

“Why do you do this?” I asked him once, watching him sit in a gap with a man who’d been frozen there for three hours.

Jesse looked at me with those deep, knowing eyes. “Because no one should have to break alone. Because I know what it’s like to carry something that feels impossible to carry. Because sitting with people in their hardest moments—that’s not a burden. That’s an honor.”

“But it must be exhausting. Taking on everyone else’s pain.”

“It’s not taking it on. It’s bearing witness to it. There’s a difference.” He paused, choosing his words carefully. “When you witness someone’s pain without trying to fix it or explain it away, you’re telling them: your grief is real. Your anger is valid. Your breaking is sacred. That’s not exhausting. That’s the most human thing we can do for each other.”

He has a key because he understands something I’m still learning: that the most powerful thing you can offer someone in grief isn’t solutions or wisdom or even comfort. It’s presence. It’s sitting in the gap with them and saying: I see you here. You’re not alone. I’m with you.

When the Curator Gets Stuck

That night, I find myself in the Room of Rage.

I don’t remember walking here—that’s how it works sometimes. I’m in one part of the museum and then suddenly I’m here, surrounded by deep red walls, breathing air that feels thick and electric.

The room knows when I need it. Or maybe I know, and I just don’t admit it until I’m already standing inside.

I sit on the floor, my back against the wall, and let the anger come. It’s been building for days—small frustrations compounding into something larger. A visitor who told me I should “just be grateful for what I have.” or the second who said “Well, can I tell you a story of someone I know, it happened for them?” A third who said, “At least you have your freedom.”

At least. At least. At least.

The rage tastes metallic, feels hot in my chest. I let it consume me here in this room where no one can see, where I don’t have to be the calm curator who has processed her grief into something beautiful.

I scream into the empty space. The sound bounces off red walls and comes back to me, distorted and raw.

I stay here for hours. Maybe longer. Time moves differently in this room, especially when I’m alone in it.

The next morning, I don’t open the museum.

There’s no sign on the door explaining why—I just don’t unlock it. four visitors arrive at different times, confused, peering through the glass trying to see if anyone’s inside. I watch them from the shadows of the Archive and don’t move. Don’t explain. Don’t apologize.

The Room of Rage is still occupied. I slept here last night, curled on the floor with my blanket from the Gallery for Visitors, my dreams full of fire and fury.

The museum can’t be open when I’m like this. It’s not safe.

Not safe for the visitors, who might see me and misunderstand what this place is about. Not safe for me, who needs this room closed and private while I work through whatever’s burning in my chest. Not safe for anyone.

Around noon, I hear a key turning in the lock—and soft footsteps entering the Foyer.

“I know you’re in here.” Sarayu’s calm voice echoes through the galleries. “The room’s closed to the public, which means you’re in it…Which means you need help getting out.”

I don’t answer.

Her footsteps move through the museum methodically—the Tender Galleries, the Archive, the Hall of Melancholy. She’s checking each room until she finds me. When she reaches the Room of Rage, she doesn’t enter. She just stands in the doorway, her silhouette backlit by the softer lighting of the hallway.

“How long have you been in here?”

“Since last night.”

“It’s past noon. Have you eaten?”

“No.”

“Are you ready to come out?”

I consider this honestly. The rage is still present but less consuming now, more like embers than fire. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

Sarayu sits down in the doorway, one leg in the room, one leg out—straddling the threshold the way I’ve watched so many visitors do when they’re frozen between two emotional states. “I’ll wait. But I need you to know: the Memorial Garden hasn’t been watered today. The Archive cases need dusting. There are visitors who keep coming back and leaving confused when the door’s locked.”

“Let them be confused.”

“Okay.” She doesn’t argue. Doesn’t try to pull me out. Just sits. “But you need to eat something. And drink water. You’re not just the museum—you’re also a person. And people need to eat.”

She’s right, but I don’t want her to be right. I want to stay in this room where rage is allowed, where I don’t have to be functional or inspiring or anything except angry.

But my body is tired. My throat is raw from screaming. And Sarayu sitting in the doorway reminds me that there are other rooms, other states of being, other ways to exist beyond this fury.

“I’ll come out,” I say finally. “But the museum stays closed today.”

“Deal.”

She stands and extends her hand. I take it and let her pull me to my feet. We walk together back through the galleries toward the Gallery for Visitors, where she’s already set up tea and sandwiches on one of the small tables.

“You knew I’d come out,” I say.

“I hoped you would. But I was prepared to sit in that doorway all day if necessary.”

We eat in silence for a while. The food grounds me, reminds my body that it exists outside of emotional states, that it needs practical things like nourishment and rest.

“Why do you do this?” I ask her. “Help me when I’m stuck.”

Sarayu looks at me over her tea. “Because you help visitors navigate their grief. Someone has to help you navigate yours. You’re not exempt from needing tending just because you’re the one who tends.”

“I should be better at this by now.”

“Better at what? Grief? There’s no ‘better’ at grief. There’s just learning to live with it in different rooms.”

Three Keys

You’ve noticed by now that three people have keys to this museum.

Eli, who maintains the foundation. Sarayu, who tends the garden and reminds me to tend myself. Jesse, who sits with the broken.

You want to know why three. You want to know if there’s significance in the number, if I chose them deliberately, if there’s some symbolic meaning you’re supposed to understand.

I didn’t choose them. They appeared. At different times, in different ways, for reasons I still don’t fully understand. But they each came when I needed something I couldn’t provide for myself.

Eli came when I was standing in an empty field with impossible blueprints, and he said: I’ll help you build it.

Sarayu came when the garden was dying and I was too deep in my own rooms to notice, and she said: I’ll tend what you can’t.

Jesse came when I was watching a visitor break apart and realizing I couldn’t hold them alone, and he said: I’ll sit with them. I’ll bear witness.

Three people. Three gifts. Three ways of keeping a museum alive.

I’ve come to understand that they work together in ways I can’t fully explain. When Eli repairs a crack in the foundation, Sarayu knows exactly which plants need moving. When Jesse sits with someone in a gap, Eli somehow knows to check the structural integrity of that threshold. When Sarayu moves me out of a room I’m stuck in, Jesse appears later to sit with me while I process what I experienced there.

They don’t coordinate visibly. They don’t hold meetings or compare schedules. But they’re connected in ways that feel deeper than organization. Like they’re three expressions of something singular. Like they see the museum—and me—from angles I can’t access alone.

I built this museum to house my own grief, to give architecture to loss that had nowhere else to live. I thought I’d be the only curator, the only keeper, the only one who understood how to navigate rooms that refuse easy answers.

But buildings need tending. Gardens need tending. People who freeze in gaps need tending. And curators—even curators of their own grief—need tending too.

Eli makes sure the foundation holds when I’m too deep in my own rooms to notice the walls are cracking. Sarayu keeps the chaos growing in the right direction when I forget that even grief needs feeding. Jesse sits with visitors when I’m too exhausted to witness anyone else’s breaking, when I need someone else to bear the weight for a while.

They appeared at different times, in different ways. They stayed for different reasons. But they each have keys because they each understand something essential: that this museum is alive. That it requires daily maintenance, constant attention, ongoing care. That you can’t build something from grief and then walk away from it. You have to tend it, the way you’d tend anything living and growing and perpetually becoming.

What I can tell you is this: every morning, one of them is here before I am. Every evening, one of them locks up after I’ve forgotten to. They tend what I can’t tend. They see what I can’t see. They hold what I can’t hold alone.

The Room That Doesn’t Exist Yet

Before she leaves, a visitor stops at the guest book near the exit. She writes for several minutes, then closes the book and walks out.

After she’s gone, I read her entry:

I couldn’t enter the room that doesn’t exist yet—the one that comes after Force. The one that says: you survived this, and now what? Now how do you live? I think you’re still building that room. I think maybe we all are.

I close the book carefully and stand in the Foyer for a long time, thinking about what she wrote.

She’s right. There are rooms I haven’t built yet because I haven’t lived them yet. Spaces I haven’t designed because I don’t know what they should hold.

The Gallery of Force tells visitors that they’ve become something powerful, that their denied motherhood exploded outward into the universe. But it doesn’t tell them what happens next. It doesn’t say: and then you lived. And then you kept living. And then the living became its own kind of room.

What comes after Force?

I don’t know yet. Maybe it’s peace. Maybe it’s purpose. Maybe it’s just the ordinary miracle of waking up each day in a body that still carries loss and also carries life.

The architecture keeps evolving because I keep evolving. And maybe that’s the point—maybe the museum is never meant to be complete. Maybe it’s meant to be a living structure that grows and changes, that adds rooms and gaps as needed, that accommodates whatever comes next.

I mentioned this to Eli once—the room that doesn’t exist yet.

He nodded slowly, the way he does when he’s thinking about foundations. “Every building needs room to grow,” he said. “You don’t build all the rooms at once. You build what you need, and you leave space for what you’ll need later.”

“But what if I never figure out what that room should be?”

“Then it stays unbuilt. That’s okay too. Some rooms are just potential. They don’t have to become actual to matter.”

Sarayu, when I told her about the visitor’s observation, laughed softly. “Of course there’s a room you haven’t built yet. There’s always a room you haven’t built yet. That’s what it means to be alive.”

“But shouldn’t I know by now? Shouldn’t the museum be finished?”

“Finished things are dead things,” she said. “The garden is never finished. Neither are you.”

Jesse, when I asked him about it, was quiet for a long time. Then he said: “Maybe the room that comes after Force is the room where you finally believe you’re allowed to rest. Not because you’ve earned it. Not because you’ve processed everything. Just because you’re tired, and rest is what tired people need.”

“Is that a room? Just… rest?”

“Maybe it’s the most important room. Maybe it’s the one no one thinks to build because we’re all too busy becoming forces of nature.” He paused. “Maybe after you’ve transformed your grief into power, you’re finally allowed to sit down.”

I’m still thinking about this. Still turning it over in my mind as I walk through the galleries at night, as I tend the museum and let the museum tend me.

The room that doesn’t exist yet. The space for what comes after.

Maybe I’m building it right now, in the quiet moments between visitors, in the conversations with the three who hold keys, in the slow recognition that tending something is its own kind of living.

Maybe the room will reveal itself when I’m ready.

Maybe it’s already here, and I just don’t have a name for it yet.

What Tending Means

You came here expecting answers.

You wanted to know how this museum works, whether it’s real or metaphorical, when I built each room, what triggered the need for the Room of Rage, why the seasons exist simultaneously in the garden, how the mirrors show potential instead of reality.

But those questions assume the museum is finished. That it’s a static thing to be explained and understood and mapped.

It’s not.

The museum is alive. It grows when I’m not looking. It adds rooms I didn’t plan. It requires daily maintenance and constant attention. The foundation cracks under the weight of accumulated grief. The garden grows wild if untended. Visitors freeze in gaps and need someone to sit with them.

This is what I’ve learned: you can’t curate grief alone. You can’t build a museum for your own loss and expect to maintain it in isolation. Even curators need help. Even buildings built from personal pain need other hands to keep them standing.

Eli tends the structure. Sarayu tends the chaos. Jesse tends the broken. And together, they tend me—reminding me that I’m not just the museum. I’m also the person inside it. And people need tending too.

You’re leaving now, walking back through the galleries toward the exit. You pass Sarayu in the Memorial Garden, her hands in the soil, tending something that looks like dying but is actually becoming. You pass Eli checking a doorframe in the Hall of Melancholy, making sure it can hold the weight of people who lean against it when standing becomes too much. You pass Jesse sitting in a gap with a visitor who’s frozen between acceptance and rage, his presence steady and patient as he bears witness to their struggle.

You still don’t have all your answers. You still don’t know if this museum is real or metaphorical, whether the rooms are actual spaces or internal architecture. You don’t know my timeline, my medical history, the exact moment I realized I am a mother.

But maybe you understand something more important now: that grief requires tending. That loss needs maintenance. That even curators of their own pain need help keeping the doors open.

Three people have keys to this museum.

Three people see all of me—the public galleries and the private rooms, the exhibits I show visitors and the spaces I keep locked.

I didn’t choose them. They appeared. And when they appeared, they didn’t ask permission to stay. They just started tending.

The museum opens at dawn. It closes at dusk. And every single day, someone is here to help me tend it.

At dusk, after the last visitor leaves, I stand in the Foyer of Questions under the silver letters that ask What is a mother without children?

And I remember the answer from the first story, the one you walked through before you came here:

She is a Mother.

But now, after walking through this companion piece, after seeing the three who hold keys and understanding what it takes to tend a living museum, you know something else too.

You know that even mothers need mothering.

You know that the fiercest forces still need someone to remind them to eat.

You know that the strongest foundations still need someone to check for cracks.

You know that the most transformed grief still needs someone to sit with it in the gaps.

Some forces in this universe are too powerful to be contained by conventional definitions. Some love is too large to be limited by blood. Some women are meant to mother the world.

But even those women—especially those women—are not meant to do it alone.

What is a mother without children?

She is a Mother.

And she is not alone.

Three keys. Three tenders. Three ways of being held while you hold the world.

The museum continues. The story continues. The tending continues.

And somewhere, in the room that doesn’t exist yet, there is space for whatever comes next.

THE END