The Nightingale

by Kristin Hannah

In love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are. Today’s young people want to know everything about everyone.

They think talking about a problem will solve it. I come from a quieter generation. We understand the value of forgetting, the lure of reinvention.

They are not lost. Nor are they in a better place. They are gone. As I approach the end of my years, I know that

grief, like regret, settles into our DNA and remains forever a part of us.

Perhaps that’s why I find myself looking backward. The past has a clarity I can no longer see in the present.

If I had told him the truth long ago, or had danced and drunk and sung more, maybe he would have seen me instead of a dependable, ordinary mother.

He loves a version of me that is incomplete. I always thought it was what I wanted: to be loved and admired. Now I think perhaps I’d like to be known.

She wanted to bottle how safe she felt in this moment, so she could drink of it later when loneliness and fear left her parched.

“It is hard for a girl to lose her mother.” She smiled defiantly. “I lost both parents though, didn’t I? One died, and the other turned his back on me. I can’t say which hurt more.”

Why was it so easy for men in the world to do as they wanted and so difficult for women?

I am a mother and mothers don’t have the luxury of falling apart in front of their children, even when they are afraid, even when their children are adults.

If you’re going through hell, keep going. —WINSTON C

There were so many terrible aspects to what their lives now were, but there was this, too: friendships forged in fire that had proven to be as strong as iron.

“Some stories don’t have happy endings. Even love stories. Maybe especially love stories.”

I am not simply his mother now, an extension of him. I am a woman in whole and he doesn’t quite know what to make of me.

I smile at them, my two boys who should have broken me, but somehow saved me, each in his own way. Because of them, I know now what matters, and it is not what I have lost. It is my memories. Wounds heal. Love lasts. We remain.