The boxes were hidden under the bed by my late mother. Photographs, letters, folders of poetry and short stories. I was flipping through an old spiral notebook labeled English II that she most likely kept for the poems she wrote in high school. In the back, I found this: 

It seems like yesterday at times, and then it seems like a thousand years ago that this new world opened to me. I don’t know if things could have been worse; maybe they could have, but I do know that I wouldn’t live my life over again for anything in the world.

These words, in my mother’s handwriting, lead into twelve pages titled “The Stars Still Shine.” I flipped to another page.

We moved back to Gainesville. I loved my new family. All, that is, except my daddy. I had to continue listening to his filthy tongue. He would say horrible things like he wanted me to… 

This was no high school English assignment. This was my mother’s story. I knew about the story, and when her parents died, she was going to write it. We even got her a computer, but her story was just too painful. I thought it died with her. I wouldn’t live my life over again for anything in the world.

I was wrong. She’d written something, and I was holding it in my shaking hands. What is in these pages? My heart raced. I closed the notebook. Was I ready to know these truths about my mother?

I could pack the notebook away in the attic and never look at it again. Forget about it. Is that what she tried to do? I could burn it. Or, risking the chance that my memory of her could be altered forever, I could read it.

A week earlier, my brother and I stood over our mother in the chilly ICU. Oxygen and dialysis machines beeped and hissed, her purple leg throbbing under a thin sheet. We had all the facts we needed. “You won’t survive the amputation,” we told her, and we signed the hospice papers on April 10^th, 2013. Her body was frail, her belly rising and falling erratically, her breath begging to leave her. The pressure from the blood clot in her leg grew steadily more painful and she moaned. Diabetes did this. I sat next to her and held her hand. I felt bad for her, but deep in my heart I believed, You did this, Mom. 

I didn’t say that to her face. I’m not cruel, I was disappointed. She ignored the doctors’ direction for 20 years as if she never deserved to be well. And worse, it seemed she accepted her illness as some kind of penance. For what, I didn’t know.    

Patricia Shaw died the day after we signed the papers, minutes before I returned. I didn’t see her go. The nurse brought her belongings in a white plastic bag. I dug through the dirty clothes covered in cat hair and looked at my brother Michael. 

“You want any of this?” I asked.

“What am I going to do with it?”

We tossed the bag into the trash and left. 

When I got home, my husband held me.  “Are you okay?” David asked.

“I’m fine.” 

My ear to his heart, I listened to the life in him and he pulled me in tighter. I am blessed to have him close, to feel loved, but I wasn’t thinking about that. 

I’m fine? What the hell?

In that moment, and for the months that followed, I wasn’t supposed to be fine. Mom would have wanted me to be sad, to miss her, to shed some tears at least. The guilt was strong, even with her gone. It would be years before I’d understand my indifference, more prevalent than grief. But in the meantime, I couldn’t help but wonder: Did I not love my own mother? 🤎