The first summer after my daughter died, I received an email invitation to give a keynote address the next spring. I didn’t know the scholar who invited me, but she’d been told that my daughter had recently died and offered her condolences. The invitation felt confusing. How could someone who knew I’d just lost my daughter think I would be accepting scholarly invitations? How could someone who knew imagine that I would ever think again?

I was in shock that summer. My daughter had gone to bed on a Sunday night in late April, a happy, apparently healthy girl. Sometime in the night or early morning hours she suffered a massive stroke. Over the next week in the hospital, she suffered several more strokes. She died that Friday, April 30, 2010. Just weeks before the end of her senior year of high school, she was suddenly, inexplicably, gone.

I responded viscerally to the idea that these professional achievements were relevant to who I was, to “the course of my life,” but the death of my daughter was not.

In the wake of her death, well-meaning friends and colleagues urged me to return to my research, thinking perhaps that I would find escape or solace there or seeking assurance that I was re-engaging with life. But the topic that I had been researching was hardly a refuge for a parent who had just lost a child: children across the United States burned at mid-century when the furry fabric on the chaps of their cowboy playsuits exploded into flame, leaving them horribly, and in many cases fatally, burned. It was Americans’ first reckoning with “flammable fabrics.”

What I came to call the cowboy suit tragedy was itself a fragment of a planned larger project, a sociolegal history of product liability in twentieth-century America. These two projects had been interrupted by a third, a book on law, personhood, and citizenship in the long nineteenth century published in March 2010, Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth Century United States . Together these projects were the foundation for my promotion to full professor in May 2010.

Frances’s death came in the midst of this research and these professional milestones, the sort that scholars would add to their CVs. I responded viscerally to the idea that these professional achievements were relevant to who I was, to “the course of my life,” but the death of my daughter was not. When the first copy of Law and the Borders of Belonging had arrived, Frances had eagerly turned to the acknowledgments to see if she was there. She did not like what she saw. “Why do I have to share sentences with Wilder [her brother]?” she asked. “Dad gets his own sentences. I want my own sentences.” It was such a sweet moment. I remember laughing, promising that in my next book she would get her own sentences. And then a month later, she was gone.

I accepted the invitation. I had no idea of what I might speak about; I was finding it difficult to even be alive when Frances was not. But then, some weeks after saying yes, an idea for the lecture came to me: I would write a braided narrative weaving the cowboy suit tragedy, my experience of loss, and the CV together. It felt like taking a giant gulp of air after not breathing.

Though it would be another five years before I re-engaged in my research on the cowboy suit tragedy, Frances’s death increased the work’s urgency. I found myself asking what might a history that joined the personal and the intellectual, that embraced emotion together with reason, that sought some larger or more fundamental meaning than how the “so what?” question is often framed, allow us to know, to feel?