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My mother, Linda Lee Gosney Brown, would have been 72 today.

This is the 22nd birthdate of hers that has passed since she left this earth. Sometimes it has been a difficult day for me; a few times, I am ashamed to say, the day passed before I remembered its significance.

Today I thought of her when I woke, and tried to imagine what she would be like at 72. I can't, really. The same, only wrinklier, a friend said. Imagining her wrinklier, and grayer, perhaps a bit smaller, is the easy part. Who she would have grown into by today is the opaque part. As is who I would be today if I had had her presence in my life these past few decades.

She has been on my mind for the past weeks because I am within a year of the age she was when she died. I did the math this summer, calculated, accounted for leap years, and found the date ... August 24. When she was the age I was on that day, she had one year left to live.

What if you knew you had a year to live? How would you live differently? What would be important and what would suddenly be meaningless?

I imagined that I would begin a project, writing every day, counting down the days, thinking about those kinds of questions and paying attention to the daily fluctuations that came as answers.

But I don't really believe I have only a year to live. (I expect more. I know it could be less.) A more accurate puzzle for me is, how will it feel when I have lived those 365 days, and one more? What on earth will it be like when I have lived past the age that she did?

She died in early April, suddenly and unexpectedly. She was planning to begin college that fall, a community college program especially for adults beginning later in life, which generally meant women who had raised families first. She was excited about it, and a little scared, and trying to decide what classes to take first.

I imagine that she would have thrived in those classes, and continued on elsewhere and earned a bachelor's degree, and moved into some kind of professional work. She would have learned to drive -- in fact, she bought a car less than a month before her death. She would still be sending me newspaper and magazine stories, mostly about writers or about quirky things that she knew would delight me, except some of them would come as e-mailed links now instead of clippings in the mail. She would have finished the quilts she was working on. She would have adored her grandchildren, whom she never got to meet.

She's been gone more than 21 years, and I still have nanoseconds when I want to call and ask how she made a particular dish, or seek her advice, or tell her about something funny at work.

There was a time when the hope of seeing my mother again in the life to come created a stronger yearning than the thought of meeting Jesus.

We are created with memory for a reason. I don't know what all those reasons are. But on this day, 72 years after Linda Lee Gosney Brown was born, I give thanks that I had my mother for as long as I had her, and for the love and all else she seeded in me that still bears fruit today.