When my husband and I first met and started sharing those many detailed stories about our lives, he told me about his mother. He said that she’d passed on Christmas 1992.

“You mean, she passed on around Christmas time?” I asked.

“She didn’t answer her phone when I called her on Christmas Day,” he told me. “The next day, I drove to Richmond to check on her. When I got to her apartment, I found her there. She’d died some time around the 25th.”

His story had a familiar ring. I’d found my mother - unconscious in her apartment - on Christmas Day 2001. We called the ambulance and we rushed off to the hospital. She never regained consciousness and passed on a few days later.

In Christmases past, my mother often talked about her mother. When my mother was in her early 30s, her mom had passed on.

“It’s been almost 50 years since I saw her,” she told me one time. “But what if for her, this passage of five decades is like me stepping into the kitchen right now to get a snack while you wait on the couch? What if the long wait is only from my perspective? I hope that’s how it is. I know she misses me. I don’t want to think of her missing me for 50 years.”

“You know what Einstein said about time?” I asked her. “He said that ‘to those of us that are committed physicists the past, present and future are only illusion, however persistent.’

“In other words, time is really a human construct and it’s an illusion.”

She seemed comforted by this explanation.

Now I’m the one wondering about all those same things. Is time just an illusion? I suspect that it is. Our eyes see a sliver of the light spectrum, our ears hear only a sliver on the sound spectrum, so it seems probable that we’re only seeing a sliver of the reality of this dimension of time.

Those are the hypothetical arguments. What I do know - beyond any doubt - is that sometimes, I miss my dear mother more than ever.

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My mother (Betty Fuller) and her mother (Flossie Appleby) in the late 1930s.