My mother. What did she say to me last week at the cemetery, you might have wondered.

My first questions was, “I couldn’t save my boy. What kind of mother does that make me?” Mom was characteristically blunt. “You were blinded by hope.”

It’s something that hadn’t quite occurred to me and I found it a little freeing. It twists blame with the light of positive mothering. How we always hope for what is best for our children can never be counted as a fault or a weakness.

While I knew Danny was suicidal in those sixteen days of March, I clung to his life-affirming acts as proof of something.

Fishing, working out at the gym, corresponding with potential roommates in Boulder.

Though panic laced the days and an overwhelming sense of powerlessness colored everything back then, we hoped.

A few days after hearing my mother’s opinion, synchronicity afforded confirmation with a pithy post on Instagram.

My second question to my mother concerned the future. I asked her how I’m supposed to go on. “Dare to live,” she said. “Dare to live large. Dare to not give a fuck.”

She lived large. Me? The hemming and hawing middle child? Less so.

I guess I can let loose with my surviving son and send him funny memes when I know he’d probably prefer I didn’t (I’m not really kidding here).

This morning on a podcast, I heard the Irish poet David Whyte utter these words:

“The world was made to be free in… Anyone or anything that does not bring you alive, is too small for you.”

Earlier in the interview, he quoted an Irish saying: “The thing about the past is that it’s not past.”

All of this by way of saying, I’m wondering in what ways my past might afford some answers. By the past I don’t mean my childhood in the suburbs of Schenectady or Pittsfield, but the past in the hills of my ancestors in Ireland.

What do some of my old books have to say about grief, about love, about living large?

If you gave yourself permission to live large, what would you do differently?

Krista Tippet interview with David Whyte here.