My grandfather was a rigid（刻板的）perfectionist. Everything had to be orderly, precise and punctual. I was frightened of him until the day he died. Growing up, my mother desperately wanted to please him. She probably thought he might leave if she didn't.
In fact, I now think the fear of being left alone, abandoned, was a current throughout much of her life. A few years into my father suffering from Alzheimer's, my mother's voice on the phone sounded so upset that I had to tell her, ""Just be with yourself for a little while. Be calm and everything can be better. "
"No, I can't do that. I don't want to do that," she said suddenly, closing the door on the subject. A while after my father died, she told me that she kept the television on all the time because it made her feel less lonely. "It makes the house seem to have more people living in it," she said. I had given in to my annoyance and either turned the volume down or turned it off. But after she told me that it filled in some of the loneliness, I never reached for the remote control again.
We have had a long journey together, she and I. Over a half-century of memories, now that the journey has ended, I have a choice which ones to study and which ones to turn over in my hands and dust off（抹去）.
I choose to look at the ones that ache with a sweet truth not told often enough. There was love between us. It was just hard to find sometimes. I choose to remember her face on that winter day in Manhattan, when I came to her with a broken heart. I choose to remember walking on the shore with her in summers when we rented a beach house. Somehow the sea always changed us. I choose to remember how she looked on my wedding day when she handed me a bracelet（手镯）that had belonged to my grandmother. "Something old," she said.
