My mother missed my new life by four years.

I completed revisions on a memoir last week about a summer of golf.

It was written almost accidentally, and I never thought anything would come of it, but it turns out that I like it a lot.

More importantly, so does my agent. With a little luck, I may have some good news about it in the near future.

It also turns out to deal with a lot more than just golf.

In one section, I’m writing about my mother, who died in 2007, when this thought occurs to me:

My mother died before I ever published a book, took a stage to tell a story or became a father.

She never met my children. She never read any of my books. She never heard me perform on stage.

Though seven years have gone by since her death, all of those things, which have become three of the most important parts of my life, existed just four years after her death.

Clara was born in January of 2009.

Something Missing published in the summer of 2009.

I took the stage and told my first story for The Moth in 2011.

Four years after my mother was dead, I was an author, a storyteller and a father.

In many ways, my mother never knew the person I was to become. It breaks my heart, both for me and especially for her.