I often think of my 20-year-old mother today.
Irish Catholic.
Exactly 8 & 1/2 months pregnant.
Her President, the age of her father-in-law, shot dead, beside his wife, on a Texas street.
My mother was 17, the age of my son, when she went door to door with her younger sister.
“The Kelly girls,” the neighbors called them.
Their mother sent them out to campaign.
I think of the unbearable grief that I felt on 9/11 & 11/9 and on the December day when children were shot inside their first-grade classroom, and I wonder that today is not my birthday.
And I wonder, what my young mother felt in those last two weeks with me inside.
And I wonder if the sweet sensitivity of my own son is due to the grief I held as he came into the world and she left it.
The Empty Nest Diary 