I had a conversation with my mom the other day about grief and religion. It wasn’t a monumental conversation but ended up being just the kind of talk that settles in your bones and keeps you company for days after. What I kept circling back to, over and over, was this: I’m grieving the freedom I never really got to have. Not freedom in some abstract sense. I mean the actual, practical freedom to explore, to ask a real question out loud, and to see what happens. Exploration re