Flying to England when I should be in class ought to be exciting, but the journey is bittersweet. It marks the end of one story and, perhaps, the beginning of another.

I was asked to go to the British Museum in ,A HREF=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London”>London to collect some of my mom’s papers, so I am. Then I will do the one last fun thing we planned to do together: go to Cornwall and paint a seascape.

Mind you, I am under no delusion that I am a good painter. It is just that we read a book once, “The Shell Seekers,” and were inspired. We planned to make fools of ourselves together, mom and me. Sitting on a bluff, wind in our hair, trying to do what we had never done before. Now I will do it alone, in her honor.

She was a Shakespearean scholar, a full professor of English at Chapman University in Orange County, and my mother, in that order. She researched in libraries here and abroad, and published textbooks and numerous other writings.

My mom had her own desk at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, and after her death I went there to claim her papers. I found a gardenia in a plastic cup filled with water. Gardenias were her favorite flower.

Littered across her desk were scraps of paper with carefully written citations – would be footnotes for an unwritten paper. Left by her many scholar friends, I knew without looking them up, references to passages that summed up their feelings about her.

The makeshift memorial was both touching and compelling.

I don’t know what I’ll find at the British Museum but it doesn’t matter. I will feel her presence there as strongly as I feel it now, writing about her.

I’m her eldest daughter. She became seriously disabled at an early age, so I lived with and cared for her for many years before her death.

Thinking I knew her well, I continue to discover surprising things about her that I never knew. Regardless of how difficult she could sometimes be, I miss her. I suspect I always will.

But I am proud too. Across this country, English majors read from textbooks she helped write. Scholars rely on essays she painstakingly researched.

I hope to visit many of these same scholars when I am in London. I know in their reminiscences there will be lessons.

I am discovering that whether I want to be, I am my mother’s legacy. Everything I do, or don’t do in my professional life, reflects the way she will be remembered. In that discovery is a new beginning. It is why at fifty-something, I am back in college.

I always meant to be a writer. I attended Chapman, where mom taught for 38 years and at the time was chair of the English Department. It’s one thing to take the free ride that comes with having a professor for a parent. It’s another thing altogether to choose their department to major in.

If only I had it to do again.

So I wrote stories for my children and novels for myself (after they went to bed at night), but made no effort to publish. Even now, with the children nearly grown, the novels still sit collecting dust.

But that was yesterday.

Today I can only imagine the feelings that will well up in me on the shore in Cornwall, remembering the story that inspired us, remembering mom. I wanted one last gift from her, something to hold on to, to remember her by and to pass down to my children.

But the gift may not be in the painting. It may instead be in the reminder.

It is never too late, nor too soon, to start being the person you are meant to be.