There is a particular cruelty in forgetting. We dress it up in softer language. We call it moving on, healing, closure. We treat forgetting as the natural conclusion to grief, as though memory were a wound that needs to close rather than a responsibility that demands tending. But some wounds are not meant to close. Some wounds remain faithful precisely because closing them would constitute a second violence, an erasure layered upon the original harm.

I have written a novel called "The Wound Remains Faithful: A Tragedy of Nora." It took me more than fifty years to write it, though I did not know I was writing it for most of that time. The book concerns a seventeen-year-old girl named Nora who walks out her front door one August morning and never comes home. She writes poems in a notebook hidden under her mattress. She has never seen the ocean. She will never see it now. What follows in the novel is not an investigation in any conventional sense. There is no detective piecing together clues. There is no satisfying revelation in the final act. What follows instead is the aftermath: the weeks of silence, the months of waiting, the decades during which a family is destroyed by grief while a community learns, slowly and deliberately, to forget.

This is the particular tragedy of sons against fathers. The father does not see it coming. The father still thinks of the son as his child, as someone he made, as someone who carries his hopes. The father may have failed the son in a hundred ways. The father may have been imperious, neglectful, demanding, disappointed. But the father did not expect the blade. The father was still, in some part of himself, waiting for the reconciliation, for the return of the prodigal, for the moment when the son would finally understand.

In the wake of the death of Rob Reiner and his wife by their son Nick, the knowledge before the act emerges as the cruelest part. The children saw what Nick was capable of. They felt the danger in their own bodies. And yet there was likely no mechanism available to them that could have stopped it. You cannot institutionalize someone for being frightening. You cannot compel treatment for an adult who refuses it. The law protects autonomy right up until the moment autonomy becomes lethal.

So the children carry a specific kind of burden: not the guilt of ignorance but the guilt of accurate perception. They knew. They were right. And being right saved no one.

That's a different weight than sudden, inexplicable loss. There's no refuge in "we never could have seen this coming." They saw it coming. They lived in the seeing for years, probably. And now they have to construct a life around the fact that their fear was prophecy, that their brother was exactly what they knew him to be, and that knowing changed nothing.

Rob and his wife now lie in their graves, silent. The dead make no accusations. But they don't have to. The children will accuse themselves, asking forever whether there was some door they didn't try, some call they didn't make, some version of events where they acted differently and their parents lived. There almost certainly wasn't. But the mind doesn't accept that. It keeps searching for the moment where the story could have turned.

Martha's Vineyard. You know it now as a summer retreat for the wealthy, a place of pristine beaches and celebrity sightings. But between the late seventeenth century and the middle of the twentieth, something happened there that challenges everything we think we know about disability, about language, about what it means to belong.

It began with a gene. Families from the Weald, a forested region in Kent, England, emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1600s. They were Puritans seeking religious freedom, and they carried with them, unknowingly, a recessive genetic trait for congenital Deafness. In 1694, a carpenter and farmer named Jonathan Lambert arrived on Martha's Vineyard with his hearing wife. Two of their seven children would be born Deaf. They were the first, but they would not be the last.