Jul’s

“Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

“It hadn't occurred to me that my mother would die. Until she was dying, the thought had never entered my mind. She was monolithic and insurmountable, the keeper of my life. She would grow old and still work in the garden. This image was fixed in my mind, like one of the memories from her childhood that I made her explain so intricately that I remembered it as if it were mine. She would be old and beautiful like the black-and-white photo of Georgia O'Keeffe I'd once sent her. I held fast to this image for the first couple of weeks after we left the Mayo Clinic, and then, once she was admitted to the hospice wing of the hospital in Duluth, that image unfurled, gave way to the others, more modest and true. I imagined my mother in October; I wrote the scene in my mind. And then the one of my mother in August and another in May. Each day that passed, another month peeled away.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“By the time I rose and started walking again, I didn’t begrudge my mother a thing. The truth was, in spite of all that, she’d been a spectacular mom. I knew it as I was growing up. I knew it in the days that she was dying. I knew it now. And I knew that was something. That it was a lot. I had plenty of friends who had moms who—no matter how long they lived—would never give them the all-encompassing love that my mother had given me. My mother considered that love her greatest achievement.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“As close as we'd been when we were together, we were closer in our unraveling, telling each other everything at last, words that seemed to us might never have been spoken between two human beings before, so deep we went, saying everything that was beautiful and ugly and true.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail