It’s okay to visit the past, but you’re not really supposed to live there.

For most of my life, I’ve had questions about my parents, especially my mother. There have always been things I wanted to know about her, but even when she was right in front of me, I either couldn’t ask them, or she would not be in a position to answer.

That feeling of unresolved curiosity and the dread of lost opportunities are nagging, bothersome, incomplete feelings, born of a thousand little toddler-era insecurities.

I started asking myself questions about my Mother when I was between the ages of twelve and eighteen, but I was raised to “accept things” and “move on” with the necessities of living. That was the tone of our family: don’t discuss painful subjects, and don’t question Dad.

I asked lots of little questions anyway, but if my questioning got into tender territory, Dad would lose patience. I learned to not ask him about my Mum very often. These tendencies were practical – they stopped one from being frozen with regret or guilt – but the downside is that they just left all my questions buried under a thin veneer. Until I really decided to dig a little deeper, I’d never know enough about who my mother Angela was on the inside. Our Dad had already known her and lost her, whereas me and my sister had lost her without ever really knowing her.

After our Mum passed on in 1995, I took on a challenge for myself to write my life story as much as I could, to try to capture and make sense of the actions and events of my parents, the arc of their lives, and what my life meant. Overall, that writing project was really just me trying to answer the question “Who am I?”

Writing about my Mother’s life helped me to see her more clearly, to appreciate her anew as a person, and to reinvigorate my feeling of connection to her.

Revisiting the past can be a limiting experience, like climbing inside a box of memories and being trapped in with them, banging your head against the interior.

But, it can also be an expansive, creative experience, where you integrate new information and new insights, and describe your discoveries. The Past can be like a gallery, meant to be shared and celebrated.