Every Precious and Fragile Thing

by Barbara Davis

“Mothers are complicated. You grow up thinking you know who they are. And then something happens and you realize they have all these layers, pieces of themselves you didn’t know were there—because they’ve been carrying around stuff you knew nothing about. But maybe it goes the other way too. Maybe mothers don’t always see their children as they really are.

“Closure is a good thing, Aiden, even when the ending isn’t what we want. Maybe especially then. Because it helps us move on to what’s next—even when we don’t know what’s next.”

“It’s just funny the things we believe when we’re kids. We take them as gospel because we don’t know any better. Then we grow up and we find out it isn’t the way we thought at all—that nothing is. Things are always falling apart, and most of the time there’s nothing we can do about any of it.”

Every human on the planet had a story they told themselves, about who they were and where they came from, stories that tethered them to the world. They created a kind of context, a landscape for living. But without those stories, the world became unshaped—and then the storyteller became unshaped.

Mothers aren’t supposed to have yesterdays. To our children, we’re blank slates, patiently awaiting their appearance so our lives can finally begin. In their minds, we’ve kept no secrets, dreamed no dreams, committed no sins. But few of us come to motherhood unmarked by life. We’ve had pasts and passions—and yes, regrets.

The dying keep their own calendars, their own to-do lists. Wrongs to right. Loose ends to tie up. Emotional books to balance. But once they’ve got all the boxes

Because this is part of loving. Perhaps the truest part. To hold the hand of one’s beloved, not only in their best moments but also in their worst, to take their pain, as far as it’s possible, as your own.

she’d finally come to understand why each soul was sent out into the world. It was to love—and to leave the mark of that love on the world when the time came to leave it. This, at long last, she had done.

I’ve never been far away. Nor have you ever been alone. I’ve heard every word, felt every sob, been beside you through every heart-wrenching dream. But it’s different for me. There is no suffering here, no longing, no loneliness. Only pure love and a sense of inevitability. The waiting is not hard on this side, because our reunion is merely a matter of time—and time here is nothing. The blink of an eye, the beat of a heart, the release of a breath, and it’s done.