I miss my mom today. Something about the song I was just listening to, Sarah Maclachlan’s World on Fire reminded me of times gone by, and there I was. It wasn’t the same sort of missing that I’ve felt in the past, though; it wasn’t that desperate ache that I’d gotten use to, and it certainly wasn’t that uncontrollable sense of panic I felt at the beginning of avelut. Instead, this felt just like, well, sadness. It’s passing already, but it came to visit nonetheless.

Something I read a few weeks back opened up a new awareness for me when it came to memories of things past. I’ve long been a sucker for nostalgia, even though I know it’s a false feeling: it’s a way to reconnect with a past that isn’t exactly what you remember in the nostalgic moment. As I said, I’ve been a sucker for nostalgia, basking in those pseudo-memories, although basking isn’t the right term, really. Instead, those sweet almost-memories have caused me heartache, a sense of longing for a time that’s gone, for a moment that was fleeting.

The sense of loss, however, completely inverts the way things are. When I experience that heartache during nostalgia, I’m ignoring the context within which the memory takes place—contexts that are not as pleasant sometimes as the memory I’m remembering. For instance, the song “All These Things That I’ve Done” by the Killers, often reminds me of these beautiful carefree days I spent staying home with my kids; what I forget, though, is that the time period coincided with the hardest times in my marriage (problems resolved and over, B”H). The biggest problem, though, with these flights of nostalgia is that I invert what is really lost and what really remains.

A.J. Heschel writes in The Sabbath, “What is retained in the soul is the moment of insight rather than the place where the act came to pass,” and this is the heart of the inversion. My nostalgia prefers place over insight, so the “when” of what took place blurs the emotional and spiritual moment that took place. For me during so much of avelut, nostalgia corrupts my memories of my mother, corrupts in the sense that it places my her in a setting that is irretrievable, and that makes the memory mournful.

The truth of the matter is that the emotional connection I had with my mom remains always retrievable. While her space, her position in the world is gone, it’s folly, indulgent to think that her physical presence, her location, was somehow more important than what she communicated to me emotionally and spiritually.

Anything I recall via nostalgia should not come with a sense of lost. I have not lost anything; I am who I am, what I am because those moments remain an integral part of me. I can miss my mom since she’s not here any longer, certainly, but her touch lives in me, and that should be a cause of joy, not tears.