To remember is to bring back into membership.  To re-member. To welcome back into the circle.

What part of me have I not forgotten, but also not re-membered?

Who are you, dear one?

What part of me is still not in here?

Hmmm.  Has she wandered away?  Is she sitting quietly in a corner somewhere?
Weeping, perhaps?  Seething?

I see a young woman sitting on a rock, out on the beach somewhere,
knees up to her chin, deep in thought
sad.
Just sad.

Oh.  Can I allow that, too?
Allow that sad part of me to sit here with the anger and sarcasm and the wisdom and joy
with the vitality and the romantic and the bored and the resentful?
What about sad?
…………………

Last night I got up at 2:30 and had to write about one of my mentors from grad school.
Nancy. She’s in a dementia ward now at a local hospital near where she used to live.
She always stayed in touch, so last year, when I didn’t hear from her,
I got in touch with someone who knows her well and lives nearby
and he told me he’d visited her and had passed along my greetings.

I am sad to lose her, little by little in this way.
But what I was thinking about was another conversation elsewhere
and my thoughts went like this:

I can’t for a minute imagine that if Nancy and I had been at the same conference
and decided to go out to dinner together
and that if I’d brought a friend along that I thought she’d like to meet,
I can’t imagine that even if they had hit it off
that she would spend 3 hours with us and never ask me a single question
and never engage me in the conversation.
Especially if it were at a conference where I had just delivered
my first international presentation based on work that we’d begun together.
No.

She would have been interested in hearing how it went for me,
what it was about and how I was doing.
She’d want to know some of the details of the work,
and details about my life
and she would reflect back to me some essential, good part of myself
that she would see still burning in me like a bright candle
even when I doubted myself.

Is it fair to compare them?
Yes.

It is fair and important to recognize the gift of true friendship.

Nancy would never have ignored me or dismissed me
or taken me for granted for 3 hours over dinner
when we saw each other so infrequently.
Because she was sincerely interested in me over a lifetime.
The kind of mentors we need are like Nancy.
I miss her.
…………………

Sad is invited to sit with me here, in my heart.
She can sit in the circle here, among the honored.
And gratitude and kindness will sit beside her
and hold both of her hands.