Sixteen Years I Didn’t Speak to My Mother. Then I Went Missing, and From Her Sickbed She Said “Go Find Her”

I did not lie awake every night missing her.

That is the part I am most ashamed of.

Whole months would pass in which I did not think of her at all, and it was the not-thinking, far more than any anger, that ate sixteen years.

Grudges you tend.

It’s the forgetting that actually steals the time.

Chapter 4 — What I Became

I became a paramedic.

I think, in some buried way, I did it to prove her wrong — and I did it, in another buried way, to prove her exactly right.