Sometimes you just… you know, you’re sitting there, 2 AM, the internet is quiet. And a memory, a flash, just slams into you. A photo on Facebook, maybe. Someone’s mother, looking very frail. And you just… sigh. It’s been decades since I moved – well, retired really – to this sunny spot. Escaped the grey, the cold, the… let’s be honest, the aftermath of a spectacularly messy divorce. Mid-fifties, starting over from zero. Friendships evaporated, some chose sides, others just… ghosted. Rebuilding, you tell yourself, is a noble pursuit. A new life, a new language, a new academic focus even. And it was good. IS good. Mostly. But then you get this pang. This weird, almost somatic sensation of guilt. Not the kind that paralyzes, more like a dull ache in a joint that used to bother you. My mother. She was… difficult. A personality disorder, perhaps, undiagnosed in her era. Or maybe just a spectacularly self-involved woman, hard to say without a full differential. But she was my mother. And as she aged, as the calls became less frequent – my fault, mostly – the cognitive decline, the increasing frailty, it became… abstracted. A concept. News relayed through a cousin, filtered, almost clinical. “She’s less mobile now,” “Her short-term recall is quite poor.” Information, not experience. And you realize, with a kind of gentle horror, that you chose. You chose the new life, the rebuilding, the sunshine, the anonymity. And you left her, in a way. Not abandoned, not cruelly. But just… not present. Not there for the slipper-shuffling, the slow descent into utter dependency. You know that feeling, when you rationalize something for years, perfectly logical reasons – distance, expense, her own difficult nature – and then, suddenly, at 2 AM, the elegant rationalizations just… crumble a bit. They don’t disappear, but they lose their shine. Like a perfectly polished antique that suddenly shows a hairline crack. And you think, “Ah. So THIS is what that feels like.” Not regret, exactly. More like a quiet, internal audit. Of a life lived. And of choices made. Sometimes you just… you just have to sit with that.