Annie Laurie

San Francisco Examiner/July 30, 1909

A WOMAN died of joy the other day because her son was coming to visit her.

She had not seen him for twenty years.

He telegraphed her that he was on his way, and when she went down to the station to meet him the excitement was too much for her and she dropped dead in the waiting room.

Twenty years? I wonder if it was worth while waiting all that time?

Twenty years–and the boy she knew was man grown, a man with a family, and she had never seen him since she kissed him good-by when he was a rosy youngster, and let him go out into the world to seek his fortune.

Twenty years! they were short years to him, full of life and interest and adventure but oh, how they must have dragged to that lonely mother.

I wonder if you realize in the faintest degree, you men who leave your mother alone for years and years, what the loneliness of those years is to her?

You have a thousand interests, a dozen friends, a score of new ideas every year; and she has, if she is like most women who are mothers, nothing on earth that she really cares the weight of a single hair for but you.

Who is there in the world that is worthwhile keeping you from your mother?

That friend you care so much for, why, he’d leave you in a minute for the first pair of laughing eyes that called him.

The woman you are so dead in love with? She’s in love with you, too, you say. Well, maybe she is. Has she given the best years of her life to you? Has she sat up with you night after night? Has she defended you against every hint of accusation, fought your fights as if they were her own? If she has, perhaps you ought to give up your mother for her; but if she is the right kind of a woman she won’t admire you for doing it.

Don’t bring your mother home to live with the woman you love; that isn’t fair. It isn’t fair to your wife, and it isn’t fair to your mother, but don’t let anybody in the world keep you twenty years away from the truest friend you ever had in the world.

Twenty years! I wonder how much the things that kept him away so long were worth to that man when he walked into the waiting room and saw his mother dead.

Dead of joy and the long agony of waiting.