Living on Borrowed Time

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
— T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

It’s the middle of November and there’s a familiar ache growing, the depths of December approaching. Each year, the window between my birthday and the day my mother died feels like a netherworld, an in-between of what could have been and what will never be. I was 14 when she died. I had been 14…