I never much cared for butterflies as a child, because to me they symbolized death. Their very existence represented the end of a caterpillar’s life, and I have always preferred beginnings to endings, no matter how beautiful.

My mother was notoriously indecisive, and one summer, when she took my sister and me on a road trip to visit her family in New Jersey, we returned to find that our father had taken it upon himself to purchase a house for $0 down.

She was livid, but I was elated when the home soon became infested with caterpillars. I would trap and tend to them in small buckets in our garage, but the inevitable cocooning would come and then they’d be gone. Caterpillars could never stay the same, and I hated butterflies for it.

My mother, Eileen, died in 2010, and my sister and I sat shiva for a week. When we finally emerged for the customary walk around the block, the first thing we saw was a fluttering yellow butterfly — the first butterfly I had ever seen on the streets of New York. In that moment it was a cruel, complicated, beautiful reminder that nothing can stay the same.