Why shouldn’t I be relieved? I am not happy, mind you. I have no plans to party now that you’re gone. It’s more like releasing a breath that I’ve been holding for forty-seven years.
I don’t want to keep you from your journey, or me from mine. You were my mother for a reason. Why I needed you, what I learned from you that is of genuine positive worth, I may never know.
These last few months, starting somewhere around last summer, I consciously started loving you. Did you notice that? I think you did — there was an immediate positive change in our relationship. I told no one about it at the time. I loved you because I wanted to, because I always wanted a mother to love. So I decided to love you whether or not you “deserved” it. Who can “deserve” love, come to think of it? It is too great and precious a thing to be confined by our narrow rules.
Patricia’s daughter, in her card, told me that, at about that time, you started talking a lot about me and Peter and how proud you were of me and my son. That is a gift, that knowledge.
So, yes, you hurt me terribly. I’m sure I hurt you — I know I tried to hard enough. And I loved you. And I’m glad that I loved you. It felt very, very good, for one thing. It was a completion, and maybe not a small one, as I had thought at the time.
white pebble 