This is why I tell people who are in caregiving arrangements to keep records. Not because they’re planning for a dispute. Because records are how you prove to the world, and sometimes to yourself, that you were there. That you paid attention. That it cost something and you did it anyway and the cost was real.
My mother’s cost was different. Her cost was in the erosion, the losses she couldn’t stop, the body and mind doing things she wouldn’t have chosen. My cost was in the choices I made around hers, the years organized differently than they would have been otherwise.
Both costs were real.
Both of them happened.
The house is someone else’s now, and the kitchen smells like someone else’s cooking, and the floorboard creaks for someone who doesn’t know the significance of the sound.
I am in an apartment with a window over my kitchen counter and a door to my office that I can close.
My name is Claire Bennett. I am forty-two years old. I am not wealthy, and I am not starting fresh, because you don’t start fresh from twelve years. You continue.
But you continue knowing what you know, with the folder in the drawer where you can find it, and the morning light coming through the window, and the ordinary gift of a quiet Tuesday.
THE WEIGHT OF ORDINARY DAYS
There is one thing I have not said yet that I want to say now, before I close this account.
Twelve years is a long time, and it is also not the right unit of measurement.