remarked plainly that my mother had simply done exactly what she’d needed to do, given the circumstances she’d faced.
I answered her calmly, without any real heat behind it. “She did what she felt capable of doing, at the time she actually had to decide. But that doesn’t erase the real impact of what stayed unspoken for nearly forty years afterward.”
My mother apologized to me not long after that particular dinner. Not as any kind of tidy resolution to the whole situation, exactly, but simply as an honest acknowledgment
