The Shell Seekers

by Rosamunde Pilcher

Your children never stopped being children. Even when they were thirty-eight and successful career women. You could bear anything for yourself, but seeing your children hurt was unendurable.

Grief was like a terrible burden, but at least you could lay it down by the side of the road and walk away from it.

The greatest gift a parent can leave a child is that parent’s own independence.

For how unimaginably empty the past would be without him to remember. Better to have loved and lost, she told herself, than never to have loved at all. And know that it was true.

She may not have believed in God, but I’m pretty certain God believed in her.”

As long as Mumma was alive, she knew that some small part of herself had remained a child, cherished and adored. Perhaps you never completely grew up until your mother died.