He called you “Pink” because, when you were born, you were pink. Also, pink is for girls. So, a tiny pink-colored, little girl could only be “Pink.”

Then you grew, all gangly legs, as some girls do. “Like a pony,” he said. So, you became the “Pink Pony.”

One Easter, the Easter Bunny left a little present in your basket along with the candy: a pony pendant painted pink. “For me!” You were — what? — seven or eight, if that old. You didn’t question the manufacturing of a pendant pony painted pink. How many years, decades, passed before you realized that he had painted the pendant, complete with black bridle and hooves so that it wouldn’t look like it had been dipped in the bottle?

Pink was your color into your twenties because of him. You didn’t question any critique of pink from any source, be they misogynist or feminist. It was your color, given to you by him. Then, in your late twenties and early thirties, you rejected it. Not as feminine, but as childish, binding you to a helplessness, an inability to find your own power (but we won’t go down that way, not now, not here).

The rock singer Pink, perhaps, brought you back to it. Her badass attitude and, in the VH-1-behind-the-music-style interviews with her and her family, her push-and-pull relationship with her father gave you a new way to think about the color. You embraced it again; and as you grew older, pink became a sign of happiness, of joy, of rebirth, and of power because you didn’t have to worry about things like that anymore.

When he was in ICU, you wore pink every single day. Every day a shirt, a scarf: you wore something pink for him so he would know that the tiny, pink-colored little girl, now a big, gray, aging older woman, knew that he loved her. She could remember that he painted a tiny pony pendant pink just for her and she loved him, too.