What I Did This Summer
About 18 years ago, I lay in bed next to my husband on a quiet fall night. The room was dark, and we were in that comfortable silent mode while we waited together for sleep to come. It was then that I spoke the words that had been brewing in my heart for several weeks. “I don’t want my mom to die,” I said quietly, feeling like a petulant child who hates her Sunday shoes and wants to wear flip flops to church instead; frustrated and impotent. The cancer, however, was relentless and irrationally insistent. I knew what was inevitable, and over the weeks that followed, mom and I talked about all of it; life and death, the irreverent and the sacred, the real and the fantasy, and in those phone conversations we said all the loving and trusting words that a mother and daughter might want to say to one another before goodbye. And even so, she slipped away sooner than I had imagined and before I could get there to say it all in person. I don’t blame myself for that, or her,