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Cookies and Wine

This is going to sound ridiculous, but... I just ate the last cookie my mom ever bought for me... When I moved overseas 5+ years ago, the only thing I reeeeeally missed was Girl Scout cookies. So it became a habit of my mom's to order a couple extra boxes of Thin Mints and Tagalongs (the best GS cookies,of course) every year to save for me. Last year was no exception. I arrived home last June to find a proper mountain of cookies - enough for myself and a friend - waiting for me. Most didn't make it through the summer. But I just couldn't bring myself to eat the last sleave of Thin Mints. They've been sitting in my freezer for nearly a year, reminding me that my mom will never buy me another box of cookies again. But tomorrow I leave "home" for three months. It was now or never. So I ate them. I know it's silly - they're just cookies - but I feel like I've lost another connection to my mom. And it's crushing me.

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Comment by M Adams on June 2, 2017 at 11:29pm: I'm so glad you ate them, and that you wrote about it here -- you've had the chance to consume a physical embodiment of your mother's love, and that is something so special. Now those cookies are sustaining you, becoming part of you. It's like a letter left for you by your mother, telling you again how she kept you in her heart.

Somewhat similarly I have been slowly eating up all the special treats that my husband craved and loved...I didn't tend to eat them when he was alive because they were specially for him, but now I feel almost sacramental about it. In terms of sounding silly, you certainly don't to me -- there is a box of his icecream in the freezer here that I haven't touched and it's been ten months, so maybe it is all crystals by now. Actually I haven't been able to face looking inside the package -- I'm weak and wimpy and fearful these days in a way that I don't think he would recognize. You say crushed -- that is a perfect way to describe it, like the breath has been pressed out of your lungs -- though I still hope that remembering love we've been given will at some point help us to go on in life.