"She exhausts easily under the pressure of being interesting."

I have a coworker who talks about her mother often. Her mom died in 2003 of what started as breast cancer and she sounds like the kind of woman I regret not having known. Smart and capable, during a time when she wasn’t supposed to showcase those kinds of strength. But different in that her husband became sick when she was still a young mother and so she had a combination of old-fashioned feminine charm and an independence born of survival. I never met her, but that’s what she sounds like.

After she died, her daughters had to go through her house and organize and pack up her belongings. In her desk they found slips of paper with quotes she liked, written down. Through stories I think I can tell how her mom probably felt upon reading a quote like this. And why she would have written it down.