Nearing the end in her little room in the nursing home, I would often take my mother’s hand, pushing its leathery, crusty skin folds back and forth. I later wrote in a novel of a character who, similarly sitting next to their dying mother, finds some hand cream and rubs it into the back of her mother’s hand. I never did that. I made it up. I made it up regretting that so much of my thought had gone into my writing a novel about loving people around you and so little into loving the people around me. Maybe that’s what the past is. Making it up so we can keep moving along. Perhaps the past is
...more
