"I am thinking about her always. Things of the mom facts - real words, looks, laughs, and actions of hers. But it is my own mind that selects and groups them. Already, less than a month after her death, I can feel the slow, insidious beginning of a process that will make the mother I think of into a more and more imaginary woman. Founded on fact, no doubt. I shall put in nothing fictitious (or I hope I shan't). But won't the composition inevitably becomes more and more my own? The reality is no longer there to check me, to pull me up short, as the real mom so often did, so unexpectedly, by being so thoroughly herself and not me.
Today I had to meet a man I haven't seen for ten years. And all that time I had though i was remembering him well - how he looked and spoke and the sort of things he said. The first five minutes of the real man shattered the image completely. Not that he had changed. On the contrary. I kept on thinking, "Yes, of course, of course. I'd forgotten that he thought that - or disliked this, or knew so and so - or jerked his head back that way'. I had known all these things once and I recognized them the moment I met them again. But they had all faded out of my mental picture of him, and when they were all replaced by his actual presence the total effect was quite astonishingly different from the image I had carried about with me for those ten years. How can I hope that this will not happen to my memory of my mother? That it is not happening already? Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes - like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night - little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The real shape will be quite hidden in the end. Ten minutes - ten seconds - of the real mom would correct all this. And yet, even if those ten seconds were allowed me, one second later the little flakes would begin to fall again. The rough, sharp, cleansing tang of her otherness is gone."
