Remembering my mother on the second anniversary of her death
Anne, with cat and my older sister, circa 1959 When it’s gone, it’s over: a riff on “What I want back is what I was” Whe n my mother died two years ago today, it was not sad. Well, that’s not true. Anne: April 2024 It was very sad to be saying a final goodbye to the woman who gave me life and shaped my life with her own. But, while holding her hand as she passed on, I knew our time together on this plane was well past done. Not because of anything between us but because of the state of her body — a body that had carried her well for more than 90 years, but a body that now at 95 and a half years of age was done. It no longer could do its job. We cannot live one without the other — spirit and soul without a body. Well, that’s not true, some would say. Spirits remain and can be felt, some would say. I like that idea, but I have no personal experience of such things. My focus here is on the body that carries us, because, by her end, my mother’s body was broken. No longer able to carry her ...