I love you every day,Mom

Every family is a ghost story.

...But behind all your stories is always your mother's story, because hers is where yours begins.

Going back to something is harder than you think."I don't suppose I could have broken my mother's heart any more if I tried.

He never spoke of that night again, not to your mother, not to anyone else. He was ashamed for her, for Mickey, for himself. In the hospital, he stopped speaking altogether. Silence was his escape, but silence is rarely a refuge. His thoughts still haunted him.' ~pg 139

I believe he died this way on purpose. I believe he wanted no chilling moments, no one to witness his last breath and be haunted by it, the way he had been haunted by his mother's death-notice telegram or by his father's corpse in the city morgue.

My mother was French Protestant, and my father was Italian Catholic, and their union was an excess of God, guilt and sauce.

It's nice that you spend a day with your mother,' she said. "Children should do it more often.