The next time I thought about calling Carol, I tried to imagine the conversation without deciding how it should end.<\/p>\n
That was harder than I expected.<\/p>\n
I wanted her to tell me what Wayne's name meant.<\/p>\n
I wanted her to explain why she had asked about the settlement.<\/p>\n
I wanted to know whether my mother had told her anything I had never heard.<\/p>\n
Those were the answers I wanted.<\/p>\n
But wanting them didn't mean Carol could provide them.<\/p>\n
She might remember something clearly.<\/p>\n
She might remember only part of it.<\/p>\n
She might have questions of her own.<\/p>\n
I had to be prepared for all three possibilities.<\/p>\n
The first meeting had taught me something I hadn't expected to learn.<\/p>\n
I had approached Carol as though the missing information belonged to her.<\/p>\n
I had assumed that if I showed her the letter, she would understand what I couldn't.<\/p>\n
But she had asked about my settlement because she needed to know what I understood about it.<\/p>\n
She couldn't give me a useful explanation if I couldn't tell her the basic facts.<\/p>\n
I hadn't realized that when I arrived.<\/p>\n
I had been so focused on my mother's letter that I hadn't considered how much of my own history I had forgotten.<\/p>\n
That realization changed the way I thought about the next conversation.<\/p>\n
I couldn't expect Carol to fill every gap in my knowledge.<\/p>\n
I had to do what I could to establish the facts for myself.<\/p>\n
I needed to know what documents still existed.<\/p>\n
I needed to understand what I could remember and what I could not.<\/p>\n
And I needed to be honest when I had no answer.<\/p>\n
I had already told Carol that I knew almost nothing about the settlement.<\/p>\n
I didn't want to hide behind that admission as though it excused me from looking further.<\/p>\n
I wanted to find out whether I could learn more.<\/p>\n
I returned to the places where I kept old papers.<\/p>\n
I checked the folders I had already examined.<\/p>\n
I looked through them with greater care, paying attention to anything that might have been connected to the settlement.<\/p>\n
I didn't find the complete set of records I was looking for.<\/p>\n
I did find reminders of how much time had passed.<\/p>\n
There were documents I had forgotten I owned.<\/p>\n
There were papers whose purpose I could no longer remember.<\/p>\n
There were names that meant little to me until I tried to connect them to a particular period of my life.<\/p>\n
I had once believed that keeping a document meant keeping the memory attached to it.<\/p>\n
It didn't.<\/p>\n
A paper could survive for years while the circumstances around it faded.<\/p>\n
You could hold something in your hand and still have no idea why it had mattered.<\/p>\n
That was how I felt about the records I was examining.<\/p>\n
I didn't want to confuse the fact that I had kept old documents with the belief that I understood them.<\/p>\n
Those were different things.<\/p>\n
I made a small pile of papers that might be worth examining more closely.<\/p>\n
I didn't know whether any of them would help.<\/p>\n
I didn't want to treat them as evidence of anything until I understood what they actually said.<\/p>\n
The process was slow.<\/p>\n
It was also necessary.<\/p>\n
Every time I became frustrated, I thought about the questions Carol had asked.<\/p>\n
I couldn't name the attorney.<\/p>\n
I couldn't name the insurer.<\/p>\n
I couldn't explain the settlement beyond what I remembered about its existence.<\/p>\n
Those were the gaps I needed to address.<\/p>\n
I wasn't going to make them disappear by becoming impatient.<\/p>\n
I thought about my mother while I worked.<\/p>\n
I wondered whether she had known that I would struggle to make sense of the letter.<\/p>\n
Perhaps she had hoped I would find the answers quickly.<\/p>\n
Perhaps she had expected me to remember details that I had forgotten.<\/p>\n
Or perhaps she had known that I would need someone else's help.<\/p>\n
I couldn't say.<\/p>\n
I didn't want to invent an explanation simply because I disliked the uncertainty.<\/p>\n
The truth was that my mother had left me a letter and a note.<\/p>\n
I had found them.<\/p>\n
I had taken them to Carol.<\/p>\n
And Carol had reacted to Wayne's name.<\/p>\n
Everything beyond that still needed to be understood.<\/p>\n
I kept returning to those facts whenever my thoughts began to run ahead.<\/p>\n
It helped.<\/p>\n
Not enough to make me feel comfortable, but enough to keep me from turning uncertainty into certainty.<\/p>\n
I had spent years assuming that my settlement was a closed matter.<\/p>\n
Now I was examining it with the awareness that I might have missed details worth knowing.<\/p>\n
That didn't mean I had to assume the worst.<\/p>\n
It meant I had to be willing to look.<\/p>\n
I began to understand why Carol's questions had unsettled me so much.<\/p>\n
They had forced me to see the difference between what I believed and what I could actually explain.<\/p>\n
I believed the settlement had been handled.<\/p>\n
I couldn't explain who had handled it.<\/p>\n
I believed the matter was finished.<\/p>\n
I couldn't explain every step that had brought it to an end.<\/p>\n
I believed I knew the important parts of my own history.<\/p>\n
But I had forgotten details that someone else considered worth asking about.<\/p>\n
It was a difficult thing to admit.<\/p>\n
I had always thought of myself as someone who could recognize when something needed attention.<\/p>\n
I didn't like discovering that I had allowed an important part of my past to become vague simply because I no longer wanted to think about it.<\/p>\n
But I couldn't change that by feeling ashamed.<\/p>\n
I could only change what I did next.<\/p>\n
I decided that when I spoke to Carol again, I would tell her exactly what I had learned.<\/p>\n
I would also tell her what I still couldn't find.<\/p>\n
I wouldn't pretend to have answers I didn't have.<\/p>\n
And I wouldn't demand that she explain things she couldn't remember.<\/p>\n
I wanted an honest conversation.<\/p>\n
That meant accepting an honest amount of uncertainty.<\/p>\n
I thought about the letter one more time.<\/p>\n
The three pages had brought me into a conversation I had not expected to have.<\/p>\n
They had made me look at a settlement I had barely examined.<\/p>\n
They had also reminded me that my mother had left something unfinished, at least in my understanding of her intentions.<\/p>\n
I didn't know what the ending would be.<\/p>\n
I didn't know whether I would eventually understand why she had kept the letter.<\/p>\n
But I was no longer treating the questions as an inconvenience.<\/p>\n
They mattered because they were connected to people I had trusted and a part of my life I had never fully understood.<\/p>\n
That was reason enough to keep going.<\/p>\n
The next time I thought about calling Carol, I tried to imagine the conversation without deciding how it should end. That was harder than I expected. I wanted her to … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40123,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-insightdrama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40134"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40134\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40154,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40134\/revisions\/40154"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/40123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}