It had been years since she question his fidelity, but he'd stepped on to the old fame track again, and that was where the road had taken them before. Infidelity could be forgiven, but forgetting it was impossible. Strangely, that wasn't what bothered her the most. What bothered her was that she didn't really care.

A daughter without her mother is a woman broken. It is a loss that turns to arthritis and settles deep into her bones.

What I know now about life is this: your mother is a part of everything you do and everything you are.

She waited for you in a thousand different ways.

If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: in love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.

Time goes too quickly. This is the advice that my mother should have given me from her hospital bed. Instead of vague, unknowable quips like "Be careful what you wish for," she should have told me time slides away on a hillside of loose shale and takes everything in its path - dreams, opportunities, hopes. And youth. It takes that fastest of all.

It was true; always had been. Friendships were like marriages in that way. Routines and patterns were poured early and hardened like cement.