257: What I Should’ve Said
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about a year and a half ago, when my mom was dying. I had this experience that I bring up here because I think it's so common. She and I were in different cities and I would go to see her most weekends once she got sick. It was pretty clear she didn't have a lot of time left. I kept thinking we should be having these really big conversations. And I don't even know what it is that I wanted to talk about. It just seemed like anything that we needed to say to each other, we better say now before it was too late. But truthfully, it wasn't like we had big issues that needed to be resolving or anything like that. All that stuff had been done years ago. And so I would go, and mostly what she wanted was just company, you know. So we'd watch old movies and we'd watch TV and we'd play little cards and chat about whatever small thing would come up. And at one level, you know, this was fine. It was completely fine, it was fine. And like I say, it was what she wanted, you know. But at another level, I would sit there like intermittently and secretly very anxious that I was wasting this time that in six months or two years or 10 years, I was gonna look back and I was gonna feel sorry that we had never talked about. And yeah, like I don't even know like what we hadn't talked about. Like I don't know, like who was her best friend in junior high school or what her house was like when she was a little girl. And I have a friend whose father died not too long ago who told me, well, if nothing else, I should use this time to just ask all the questions about all those little stories that I think I might want to know someday, you know. And we did talk about some of that stuff. There were some old stories that I never really had straight that now I know. And there were a couple of times sitting on the couch in the middle of some long afternoon where I asked my mom, you know, is there anything that you want to talk about? Is there anything that we need to talk about anything we need to get resolved or that we need to discuss? And she asked me why in my 20s, pretty much through my entire 20s, I was so distant from the family.
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