Don’t Judge. There Are All Kinds Of Reasons Why Women Wait To Tell Their Stories

The summer before my mother died, I went to visit her every Tuesday. Almost every week, she told me something new.

I took along a big black notebook that reads, “WRITE” on the front, and sometimes I recorded her on my iPhone. At first, my mother was reticent to share very many memories.

But as the weeks went by, she started telling me, “Write this in your book.”

At Arbor Hospice, where she spent her final five weeks, I mentioned to a family counselor that I was writing down my mother’s stories. She said it wasn’t unusual for people to share all kinds of previously untold information when the end was near.

“People want to be remembered,” she said, “and they want to know that they mattered.”

I’ve been thinking of that in recent weeks, as the flood of stories about sexual misconduct have been told about public figures.

This past weekend, those stories centered on Roy Moore, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama.

As of Monday night, five women had come forward to say that they were sexually harassed by Moore when they were younger, some as young as 14. These were events that happened as long as 40 years ago.