It was only years later, well after her passing, that I began to understand what she had been doing. Certainly as I limped in pain and doubt along the Appalachian Trail, I was giving myself a crash course in the power of a mantra, in the power of single-mindedness, of stubbornness, of codes, of real toughness. When I was a younger man, I was angry, and I’d wanted my mother to be angry too. But she wasn’t. She was reminding herself that despite the hideous disease that was stealing everything else from her, she still had her toughness. Because she said so, and because she could say so. And did.
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