Experience

"Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you."
-Aldous Huxley

I've never been the kind of person who wanted to go back in time.  Each year of my life seems to improve over the last, so that I never want to go backward.  The only time I came close to this was right after my mother died.  I wanted to be able to relive the last year of her life, to intervene, to make sure she visited the doctor when she was supposed to. 

As of late, I've been dealing with some guilt.  I am not as sad as I used to be over my mother's death.  I still miss her terribly, but I've found a way of dealing with her loss that keeps me from crying every day.  I feel bad about that, as if she's somewhere watching me, hurt that I don't cry for her as much.  I spoke with a woman who lost her mother almost twenty years ago, when she was still in her twenties.  She said, "If I really let myself think about my mother, I wouldn't be able to stop crying.  I couldn't get out of bed.  So I don't think about her."  It's the tactic I've taken. 

I hope this is a phase I'm going through.  The first six months after she died, all I did was think about her, replaying our last weeks together, how she smelled like Ensure, the way her cheek felt when I kissed it, the way her eyebrows got smushed when she slept, and she woke up looking perplexed.  I don't let myself think about those things anymore.  I hope at some point, I am able to think of her again without it being painful.