He looked at the notebook for a moment. Then he said something I have thought about many times since.
He said: “You have genuinely good instincts. And you’re doing this the right way — you’re documenting rather than just worrying.”
He adjusted one of her medications based on the pattern I’d tracked. Three weeks later, the afternoon confusion decreased significantly.
I didn’t put that in the folder either. But I thought about it when Daniel’s invoice arrived and the invoice’s implicit claim was that I had been a passenger in my mother’s life for twelve years, along for the ride in a comfortable house.
I had been driving. Every day, I had been the person driving.
WHAT RUTH KNEW AND WHAT SHE DIDN’T SAY
I want to be careful here, because my mother is not here to speak for herself, and I don’t want to put words in her mouth or certainties in her mind that I’m not sure about.
But I think she knew more than she said.
She knew what I had given up. She didn’t know the specifics — she didn’t know about the job offer letter, because I never told her — but she knew in the general way that mothers know things about daughters who live in their houses. She saw when I turned down plans. She heard when work calls got rearranged. She understood, in the abstract even if not in the specific, that my life had been organized around hers for a long time.
She thanked me, sometimes, in ways that were real.