Nick Phillips
My parents divorced a long time ago, in the seventies.
I was 15, my sister 17. As these things sometimes go, the family broke apart, my sister staying with my mother, and I went to live with my father.
The tears, the years, and the decades, went by. We became distant from one another, separated both geographically, as well as emotionally.
Seeing each other only every few years.
But I never stopped loving her.
She was my mom.
A poem, a favorite of mine since I was a boy, echoes in my mind. Written by George Santayana, it goes:
With our parting,
a part of me hath also passed away.
For, in the peopled forest of my memories,
a tree is made leafless by the wintry wind of separation;
And, until we meet again,
it shall never don again its green array.
Chapel and fireside,
country road and bay,
Leave something of their friendliness resigned, distant.
But not you.
For another like you,
If I could, I would not find.
And, with our parting,
I am grown much older in a day.
And yet, I shall forever treasure in my memory,
your gifts of amity, charity, and kind heart's ease.
For these gifts, once given, are indeed mute testimony to the beauty that can be found in all creation,
But perhaps nowhere more so than in a mother's heart.
And, as we part, I scarce know which part may greater be,
What I take from you, or you took from me.