The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

by Laura Pearson

I’m more about looking back, especially now there’s so much back and so little forward left.

Sometimes I cry, both for the loss of him and for the loss of all those years. For the life I didn’t live. All the lives I didn’t live. We only get to choose one, after all.

we’ll all say nice things about him, but wouldn’t it have been better if we’d said them to his face? Why do we wait until people are dead to talk about how we felt?

I’ve never really been sure what it was about me that he admired so much.

I try to see the child I knew in this old woman’s face, and it is there, just about.

And that means it’s not going to be easy, but it doesn’t mean we give up. A lot of things aren’t easy, Mabel.

the death of the person you spent your whole life with is one thing, but the death of the person you didn’t? Sometimes, that’s the real tragedy.

If I don’t have long left, have I done and said enough?

The price of living a long life, I think, is the sheer weight of the losses you have to suffer.

I raise my face to the sky and let the sun touch me, and it feels like the forgiveness of someone you love.

Can the love of your life be someone you didn’t really get to love at all?

What Patty suffered is worse. Indifference.

when I hold my life up for her to see, I’m not ashamed of it. It’s been small but special, in its way. Isn’t everyone’s?

We all have something that’s broken us, I suppose. Nobody gets away unscathed.

I wish I could see her modelling, the way she looked when she was in her teens and twenties. But perhaps she’s at her most beautiful now, with all this life behind her, all this wisdom.