Samuel was her paper child, loose-limbed and fluttery, a blank page waiting to be filled with her poetry. Thin and delicate-edged, he was the oldest, and was soon charged with caring for dreamy Ari.

Ari was her cotton child, soft, who wove stories like shawls to cover us. She drew the details of our lives into herself like pap and spun it into the legend of our lives.

Mason was her wood child, quick-thinking, a builder-child needing smoothing and sanding after every ingenious construction project, every injury and obstacle. He built a set of boxes for our mother to keep her secret desires in that nestled one into the next, as we did into her arms.

Asphodel was her leather child, red-haired and rugged, our protector against the taunts of the neighborhood children who called us names, called our mother names after our father left. Our mother kept Asphodel close and wore her like a shield.

These were the children of her young motherhood, her comforts, her joys. They marked our family’s early years. We others filled seats at the raucous dinner table, launched peas and insults at one another. We took up the used clothes and ideas of our older siblings, ripped and re-dyed them to make them our own. We traveled as a gang, wore black eyeliner and ear gauges and kept journals where we wrote down our dreams when we woke.

When our mother sat day and night by Asphodel’s bed in the hospital, the rest of us gathered around the foot, telling knock-knock jokes and reading Mad-libs to our sister in an effort to draw a smile from her life-sapped form. Later, Samuel read the eulogy while we younger ones held up our mother’s sagging, grief-stricken body.

Maybe it was this that made her see us differently.

She grew to depend upon Byron, her steel child, upright and strong, whose dependability was assured, whose unflappability inspired a series of comic stories from Ari when she went through her fairy-tale phase.

The loss of Asphodel was hard, too, on Georgia, our mother’s silver child. Mutable and introverted, Georgia had always depended on Asphodel to stop the bullies from pushing her down in the street, had relied on our older, tougher sister Asphodel to explain her little quirks and abstract oils to others. Without Asphodel, Georgia became unmoored, discovered meth. We placed her in the casket Mason made, working through the pangs from his arthritic knees to carve its delicate designs.

This second loss seemed to spool our mother into herself like a fern frond. She took to her bed. Ari recited elegies for her in between spooning broth into her mouth. Byron began to arrange a muted affair, but to our surprise, Samuel insisted we throw a dance party and bury our sister under night-blooming jasmine. On the night of Georgia’s funeral, we swayed from side to side to the music, hands lifted to the quick-silver moon, We told stories about our funny, quirky sister as the sweet perfume of the blooms filled our mouths.

Our mother allowed herself a fixed time for mourning before forcing herself from her bed. Back she went to mothering, now grand-mothering duties: cutting the crust from sandwiches, shopping for appropriately-colored mother-of-the-bride dresses and child-safe cribs.

Through it all, my sister, Kalliope, the diamond child, had put her shine on hold. But she knew — had always known — that she was made for bigger and brighter things. She sold her car, cashed out her savings, and bought herself a one-way ticket to Los Angeles where she vowed to give the California sun a run for its money and shine, shine, shine. I took her to the bus station, where I kissed a benediction onto her forehead and waved goodbye.

That left me, the golden child, valued not for my brilliance but for my malleability, my ability to be what everyone needed, always with the right comment for the occasion, the right shade of white for the winter. Perfectly pliant, I came when I was called and kept track of our siblings’ adventures and achievements. When I discovered our mother, lifeless, in her faded chair on the sun porch, it was me who knew where everyone was and the telephone numbers to reach them to call them home again, now motherless.