I found myself gradually becoming more like her since her passing.
Her obsessions, quirks, and idiosyncrasies metamorphosed into mine.
I remembered that one evening years ago, when she was, like most other evenings, toying with food on her plate, studying the serrated blade on her steak knife, making indentations with her fork on a napkin - her usual antics at the dinner table.
For the first time, our mothers were brought up in the conversation.
She talked about how she couldn't decipher hers.
The enigma originated from that time her mother took her to a charity sale in Victoria some twenty years ago.
In vivid details she recalled how her mother mulled over a set of queen bed linen, hand sewn by prisoners - she used the word "caress".
Something didn't compute in her young mind when her mother, a couturier at the time, reacted seemingly with such emotional intensity towards a rather banal product of a rehabilitation project for convicts.
I quoted Warren Fellows, whom during his twelve years of incarceration in Thailand observed that a lot of women got some sort of perverse thrill from the idea of men in prison.
She contemplated what I said for five seconds, then replied she didn't think her mother's reaction was anything sexual.
The fabric of the bed linen was this heavy, starchy cotton in pale pink with tiny white petals print.
I imagined something borderline kitsch.
Regardless, it felt cheap at first - it was certainly no Egyptian cotton, she said, but the density of the fabric gave it a rugged, solid touch; and its finishings meticulous and precise.
What unsettled her, considering her history of childhood trauma, abuse, and neglect, was witnessing her mother displaying a sort of kindness and gentleness towards an object produced by a stranger, or a group of strangers, locked and kept away from society.
One of the hypotheses, she said, was that her mother was fascinated by the thought that men were capable of a craft so exclusively matriarchal.
The other pointed to a likelihood that she was unable to come to terms with: the bed linen symbolised redemption. To her mother, these nameless, faceless criminals had been reformed by the correctional system. On the other hand, something about her own daughter was inherently sinful and irredeemable. She too often wished she'd never been born.
That evening, we were drinking a bottle of red wine she had picked earlier the day.
This young wine, soft on the palate, fruity with wild berries, spring bouquet and peachy notes, had just the right amount of tannin to my liking. And it paired almost too well with the menu du soir: New Zealand lamb racks grilled with Himalayan salt and rosemary.
"Love, don't overthink it," I said. "She bought those fucking sheets because of the high price-performance ratio in goods supplied by prison labour."
For the first time that evening, she laughed. We both laughed.
In retrospect, her laugher reminded me that of stage four cancer patients when they had clowns over for an hour and forty-five minutes on a Sunday afternoon.
My world imploded when I received a long distance call one morning, four years ago.
They found her body, rigid and cold. Severely underweight.
From then on, I had chosen to grieve by ruminating the times I failed her.
For the life of me, I couldn't remember the provenance of the wine.
Little did I know it was a farewell gift from her.
