Reading Florence Walrath’s journals, I am struck by how different every life is. She talks so lovingly of her mother and father, of her grandparents and cousins. I wonder at it.

I have no photos from my childhood, few memories. I just don’t recall much of it. My sister doesn’t either. I did not see my mother in the years before she  was found dead on the floor of her bathroom in an assisted care facility.  I was in a bad place, and didn’t even know where she was living. That seems incomprehensible to me now, but it is the truth.

My mother loved me very much and I loved her very much, but it was just not possible for me to be around her at the end of her life, I wish it were not so. I am sorry we did not get to say goodbye to one another, she more than any other person or thing inspired me and encouraged me to tell my stories and she always told me how good they were.

My mother was a creative, from decorating our house with little money to managing an art gallery to the last job of her life – hostess at a vegetarian restaurant. She was funny, charismatic, stylish fiercely individualistic and proud. People told me she was the hippest old lady in the world. She suffered much from anxiety and loneliness. She could never quite muster the strength so many women have today to break away from controlling and suffocating men and live the life she wanted. She blamed everyone for her failure to live the life she was meant to live, that she wanted to live. It made her angry and hurtful and crazy.

Some years after she died, and after I got divorced, my ex-wife generously sent a letter explaining she had found a scrapbook my mother had kept in the basement of our home. I don’t know how it came to be there. Someone probably sent it to me after she died, but I never opened it. It came to me up here, at Bedlam Farm. I was surprised and deeply affected to find an album of old photos, clips from stories I had written, and many stories written about me as I began writing books. I had never opened it, but I opened it now and my eye immediately came to rest on this photograph. It was of her and me, the only photograph I have of me with anyone in my family.

I hang the photo on my office wall, in memory of my mother and also in memory of me. I see a happy boy, a genuine smile. I think it was the time before our troubles, it must have been, because no unhappy kid could fake a smile like that, nor could my mother. Both of us look so genuinely happy, and this is the memory I have chosen to be of my childhood. Just leave it right there. I love that kid, I want to pick him up and take him out to a movie and get some popcorn. I want so badly to tell him to hang in there, it turned out fine. I got the girl.

I think of my mother whenever I look at this photo, and it is a gift. I think of her humor and her great will, her ferocious and twisted love. I see that she gave me two wonderful gifts, at least: the confidence in myself as a creative person who could tell his stories to the world, and a fierce determination to not permit anyone to keep me from living a meaningful life. I see as I look at this photos, and remember my mother’s painful struggles – I think she loved me more than anything in the world – that she infused in me the awful meaning of a hollow life, a life of regrets. Don’t let anyone do that to you, she told me again and again.

How curious is the way in which love works. Love can knock us down or lift us up, inspire us or cripple us. Looking at this photo, I see nothing but love, in me, in her, for each other. That’s a wonderful place to leave it. I heard you, mom, I heard you. I didn’t let what happened to you happen to me. If the spirits running the universe are good and kind, that message will find it’s way to you.