Inside the box was a small notebook with my name on the first page. My mother had started writing in it in 2018, shortly after her diagnosis, and the entries continued even after she could no longer write complete sentences. Most were only a few lines, but one sentence appeared again and again: “She still comes.” I assumed she was simply recording my visits because they were the only thing she could still keep track of. Then I found the entry from Thanksgiving 2022.
She had written about my sister confronting me that night and saying I was only visiting because I couldn’t stand admitting I’d given up. My mother wrote that she had listened to the entire conversation from across the table, even though nobody realized she understood what was being said. She said my sister had been right about one thing — I was exhausted — but wrong about why I kept coming. Then she wrote something that made me realize she’d understood me better than I understood myself. “She thinks she is coming for me,” my mother wrote, “but she is coming because she thinks I am still coming for her.”
The last entry was written in shaky handwriting, only days before she stopped being able to write at all. It said that every Sunday, when I arrived, she would pretend not to recognize me for the first few minutes because she wanted to see whether I would leave. I never did. At the bottom she had written, “She doesn’t know this, but every time she stays, I know who she is.” I sat on the floor with that notebook in my lap and cried harder than I had at her funeral. Four years I’d thought I was proving something by refusing to quit, and only after she was gone did I learn that she had been quietly measuring every week by whether I came through that door.
