Tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of my mother’s death. I turned twenty the year she passed. I will turn sixty this year and will have lived ten years longer than she did. I often think of the things she has missed in the intervening time. She never met my wife and never saw my children. She never heard any of my sermons, although she once told me she thought I would be a “darling” minister. She never read my books, although she knew I wanted to be a writer. But then, when I was a boy, I also wanted to be a psychiatrist, politician and a stand-up-comedian. In view of this, I suppose it is not all that surprising that I eventually became a pastor.
Every so often my mother visits me in my dreams. When she does, her visage is sad. It is as if she knows she is out of time and place. I am astonished to find her curled in her old chair, alive and smoking a cigarette. Our conversation is awkward. We are like old friends who have been separated too long and no longer have anything in common. We both know that she will soon be gone.
It is dark when I awake and I try to retain the memory. But it disappears like the vapor of breath on a cold morning. I lie in bed until dawn, trying to remember the sound of her voice. It is beyond recall.
