Your mother probably wants to hear from you – even if she lives next door, even if she lives half a world away, even if you haven’t spoken in decades. Probably she wants to hear from you – you know the particulars better than I do. In any case, it’s an interesting and revealing exercise to see what you’d have to say. If she’s no longer alive on earth, she is still alive in your mind – her phrases come to mind, in fact they come out of your mouth. In my case, whenever I say ‘Bless your heart,” it’s her, and she’s been gone for almost 15 years. And she remains present in your thoughts, at first constantly and later, as grieving proceeds, intermittently. It also doesn’t matter if you are/were o
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