In Hawaiʻi, when someone dies, we say:
I love you. I forgive you. Please forgive me.
I say this to my mother when I visit her grave.
But for some reason, I mostly think about this at the beach.
Mom didn’t learn to swim until after she retired, when she was 55 years old.
I don’t know why.
Might have been because she and her family lived away from the shore, on a sugar cane plantation.
Might have been because it wasn’t something girls did back then.
Might have been it just didn’t feel important to her parents.
But she wanted to swim so much.
Her first step was to make sure we three kids, my brother, sister, and I could swim.
She took all of us to lessons when we were little kids.
I only swam once with my mom in the ocean, me in my floral bikini, her in a blue one piece.
There was nothing but joy in her eyes, in her heart.
How I wish she could have experienced more of that.
Will you forgive me Mom, for not being there when you had a stroke, for not getting you to the hospital, for not giving you one more day in the waves?
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