John Dickerson remembers his mother, this Mother’s Day. It’s lovely.

I think of my own mother, gone 25 years, somehow, this year. To me, my mother now is all old feelings, vague impressions, dim images in a fogged mirror. But all love, all love. I think of her now as those parts of her that were most herself, the parts people have told me about now for two and a half decades, the indelible impression she gave to strangers and to friends of being someone warm and something wild. I have few memories of her left, but I remember her enough to be shamed by her compassion, her joy.

At my father’s funeral, now 17 years passed itself, I read from The Bridge on San Luis Rey. I had found an old copy he had given to his own mother, and on the front page his inscription, written in his wonderful old handwriting that creaked the way his voice creaked, “This book. This beautiful book.” So I read. “But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten.” And sure enough, the years pass.

Still, the arboretum that they named after my mother grows on. The roots are deep, and over time they snake their way down further into the cold earth which is the only source to which human bodies return. In Hurricane Irene, we lost many of them, some that had been planted by Colonel Wadsworth himself, and for a little while, I felt lost. But we plant new trees, we grow new roots. And if I am aware that her memory is passing grain by grain with those who loved her and have left us now themselves, I also know that as long as I am alive to feel that loss, her memory will persist, in a manner I neither want nor would wish away. Because for as far away as she seems to me now, memories like smoke, the truth is I still wake up in the night and feel that powerless grasping, reaching around in the dark for some object that I will never find, and it’s like it was yesterday, my father walking in that door, and I know that I will eat forever and not be fed, and within me that cold fire will burn forever.