What does family mean to you? 

All my life, I’d asked myself this same question, and every time, I could only come up with one answer. They were people placed in your life because of your DNA and they automatically became your responsibility, whether you wanted it or not. 

You didn’t get to choose your family. If we had, I wasn’t sure I would have chosen the one I had been appointed. Whenever I thought about my mother or my brother, an undeniable heaviness tended to ...