A recent writing prompt asked:

Think of someone in your life who has passed on or is unreachable. If you could have one more conversation with him or her, what would you want to say?

It didn’t take long to think of someone.

When I gave her eulogy, I said that the author of Women Who Run With The Wolves wrote that in her experience as a psychoanalyst, around the age of 40 women decide if they’re going to become bitter.

Mom was the victim of horrific childhood abuse. That and later events could have made her bitter, but they didn’t.

She was a woman of faith, and in her late 50s she said, “When I came to faith at 18, I thought everything would change. That I would become a new person and all the abuse wouldn’t affect me anymore. Now I realize it follows you your entire life, so I’ve asked God if there any way to use what happened to me to do good in this world to help other people.”

That’s when she began volunteering in the local women’s shelter and became the chaplain for the women’s jail. Her message was simple. “Jesus loves you. I was abused, too. There’s another way to live.” She loved the women and many of them loved her right back, calling her “Bible Betty,” and greeting her with a hug when they saw her in the street.

If I could tell Mom something, I’d like to say, “Thank you, Mom, for not choosing bitterness. Thank you for doing the best you could with the cards you were dealt.”