The unit that mattered was the day. The Monday morning when Mom couldn’t find the word for “yesterday” and we sat at the kitchen table for a while and she tried different words until I helped her find it and we both pretended that was normal. The Thursday afternoon when her physical therapist said she’d made real progress on the stairs and Mom looked at me across the room like a kid who’d done well at a recital. The Wednesday in year nine when a thunderstorm knocked the power out at 11 PM and we sat in the living room by candlelight and she told me stories about her own mother that I’d never heard before, about growing up in a house with no insulation in a town that got real winters, and how her mother had kept the family warm through sheer organizational willpower.
I wrote some of those stories down.
Those days didn’t cost $900 a month. They cost twelve years of Tuesday afternoons and three AM nights and job offer letters declined.
I am not saying the costs were evenly spread, or that every day was hard, or that I was heroic. I have tried, in this account, not to make myself into either a martyr or a saint, because I was neither. I was a competent, occasionally impatient, frequently tired woman who took on a large and irregular job because the job was there and she was the one who could do it.
I did it.