Memories fade. It’s true. Same as old photographs. But the pace at which those memories fade is directly related to how much they are exposed to the elements. A photograph in an album will last decades unchanged. On the fridge in your sunny kitchen—maybe a handful of years. Because letting the light into the dark places, like the deeper recesses of your mind or the old photo album on the shelf, brings change. Memories morph and rewrite themselves according to the person you are when you bring them back into the fore, and recollect. This is the inevitability of the inner work we all must do—and yet so often avoid. Because sometimes you’re not ready to forgive yourself for that ancient mistake, the one that still sometimes flashes into your mind at night. And sometimes you’re still not ready to accept the love someone once tried to give you—a someone who is, perhaps, no longer with you.

Part of the exercise of listening to these tapes—and sharing them with you—is to be open to my regrets, my shames, forgiveness and love. I don’t know what I am and am not actually ready for, but I am here for it. When I hear myself joke too harshly with my mother; when I hear myself sniffling with a cold; when I hear myself cut off my mother’s train of thought again and again—all I feel is a sickening regret. Why couldn’t I just let her talk? Why didn’t I just blow my nose!?

But I also hear something else: my mother, loving me with every word. Putting up with my sniffling, putting up with my joking, putting up with my interrupting. And perhaps sharing, as the recording in the last episode revealed, a few of those precious thoughts she’d said she’d written down somewhere.

A somewhere that to this day, neither I nor anyone else has ever found.

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