Change is happening and I want my mother!
More than anything, I wanted to tell my mother. Earlier, I had told her that we were planning to sell the cottage. She was surprised that we were moving ahead with this because she knew how much we loved the place as, indeed, she, herself, loved it, but she also understood that time moves along and one’s capacity to keep doing everything changes along with it. But Mum died in April, so I can longer tell her anything. And I am realizing more and more how her absence means I am on my own in this world of ours. Not literally. I am not alone in my daily life. I have my family and friends and community. But in the larger sense, there is now no generation above me, no older generation to be the buffer between me in the here-and-now and whatever comes next out there in the universe for me. For so many years, I had parents and grand-parents, aunts and uncles, great-aunts and great-uncles. Now they are all gone and I am the aunt. My sister and brother and I form the buffer for the two young fam