I had planned to write some yesterday, since it was my mother’s 85th birthday, as well as the fifth anniversary of her death. I’d like to have written something profound, but I think I said all of that at the time of her death.

I’ve thought about her a lot since then, as I suppose most everyone would. The past couple of years, however, have been a new kind of sorting out of my thoughts.

To put it as kindly as I can, we did not get along. Not until a few months before her death, long before she was sick with the episode of lupus that eventually caused her death, did we begin to unwind in front of each other, to simply talk about every day things.

These last couple of years, residual anger has almost completely receded, simply because so much time has passed. I can look at events that happened, and see with no bias what was going on. I see why she did what she did, and lived as she did. And I see that I couldn’t have acted any differently.

That seems like such a long-winded reason for not having written about this, that it turns out that I have written about this. Odd, how that happens.