Anniversaries

Dear You,

Another couple of mileposts drifted by yesterday. The more recent one -- thirty years' standing -- was the death of my mother. The cancer beat her to her 53rd birthday, and her death was a relief from more than two years of torment . . . operations and radiation and pills. With shame I note that our relationship in the years just before had been strained. Pride -- another of the rightly called "deadly" sins -- kept me away from her, turned away her overtures, stayed my hand from writing a letter or dialing a telephone. Then the cancer. Some reconciliation, but not enough. Thirty years has not lessened the guilt I carry when I think of her, and I think of Mother often.

The other was a promise I made on an August 17 just three years earlier, which if kept would mean celebrating 33 years of marriage. In a box in my bureau drawer is an antique gold pocket watch and a hand-made gold ring -- gifts on that long-ago day from my then-wife, and objects I rarely look at and cannot dispose of: ironically, because unlike the woman who gave them they cannot be discarded.

When I think about my life, I am aware that women have been more important than men to me, that women have affected me, shaped me, informed me more than those of my own gender. And I wonder -- often -- why I have been too often cavalier in my treatment of them. The passing of years has not done enough to solve this riddle.