My brother and his former wife come, bringing their babies, and my mother, she’s so ecstatic, she runs along the front of the house, along the stone pathway, to call her husband to greet them. She’s running too fast, though, and she trips on the stones. Sits there on the pathway and cries. Childlike. I go to her and see if she’s hurt and tell her she’s okay, it’s nothing, don’t worry about it. I’m treating her like a child because she’s crying like a child, but I think months later, in these moments that linger in the brain months late, that she wasn’t that far yet. Not far enough. Just enough between aware and not. How does the decay of identity feel? No one else can know. Disease eats them alive. By the time she knew, she could no longer say it.
I keep notes from her from that time, when she could still write. I keep those notes here with the rest, her scratched-out misspellings of my name, of milk and cereal and other groceries, of thoughts she had. Scrap paper. Crumbs. She was holding on.
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