Dear...

I just finished typing a four-page entry in a new journal to my mother.

For five years we'd exchanged nearly daily e-mails about everything and nothing in our lives and all that stopped abruptly last June. Since then I've written about her, kept in touch with others who knew her and those who loved her, and even recently attempted to locate a cousin of hers by sending a lengthy letter telling him all in hopes that it would find him. The longer I heard nothing in reply, the more hopeful I felt, but, sadly, it was returned the other day. Someone at his one-time address had opened the envelope and was considerate enough to tape it closed again and return it marked "deceased". Odd to think of some stranger reading my letter, but if it led to this confirmation, so be it. Is it possible that my mother and her sister -- the family grapevine -- had known of his passing and somehow it had escaped me? They kept track. Sad, but at least I had tried. One more of their family and that generation gone.

So tonight, after a particularly good if not particularly noteworthy day, once more I felt that desire to just check in with Dot. Since e-mails go nowhere now -- a kind of cyber Deceased -- Return to Sender, I decided that it's okay to still write to her now and then. I'm not at all sure whether or how this will progress, but for the first time in months I felt as though I'd said some of the meaningful to me (and equally meaningless to anyone else) stuff. Only a mother would have the patience and interest to sit, no, wade through the minutiae of her daughter's thoughts and comments. That is surely one of the things I never fully appreciated and now miss most.

So make of it what you will, I felt that another floodgate opened tonight and fittingly on Valentine's Day. Simply said, it felt good -- and long overdue.