A Goodreads user asked Mary L. Tabor:

In (Re)Making Love there is a passage that begins:| "When my mother was seventy years old, shortly before her stroke, I was applying her make-up for her birthday. She and I were looking in the mirror at her aged face. She said, 'I still see the nineteen-year-old girl.' Can you talk about this passage some, and what it meant to you to write it?

Mary L. Tabor My mother had died when I wrote that line. Her death broke my heart and it stays broken in a place that won’t ever repair. For that reason, she enters my writing in ways I don’t understand, perhaps because she is always with me.

Since I don’t recall what I write, I had to go back to the memoir to find it. What follows the line you quoted is this: "She was a natural beauty: long dark thick hair, fair skin, hazel eyes, delicate hands. She was obscured by the shrubbery of age. We could both see her through the trees of time. There was no noise while the nineteen year-old girl slid behind the trees.”

When I reread the line, it was as if someone else wrote it and what followed, and I was reading it for the first time. I’m not sure that gets to anything significant about the writing process, but it’s how I feel when I think about the line you quoted and discover as if for the first time where it sits in the memoir—as if it was meant to be there, right in that place juxtaposed with my reference to an avalanche that hit in Chamonix, France.

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