Nobody asked what I was proud of. Which is maybe a strange question to ask a caregiver, but it’s the one I kept returning to. Not whether I’d done enough or done it right or made sacrifices or suffered. What I was proud of.
The medication binder. The Tuesday coffee shop afternoons I protected like they were sacred. The roof. The way I’d learned, over years, to read her well enough to know which days needed different approaches. The fact that she died at home, in her own house, in the room she’d slept in for thirty years, because I was there to make that possible.
Those things.
Nobody asked, so I’m saying it here.
The people who came to the funeral said things that were kind and not always accurate. They said she was at peace and they said she’d had a good life and they said she’d been lucky to have someone like me. They meant the last one as a compliment. Sometimes it landed differently.
Lucky to have someone like me. As if I were a service she’d been provided. As if the twelve years were a feature of her situation rather than a choice I had made, over and over, in the available minutes of every day.
I was her daughter. She was my mother. We had twelve years at close range, which gave us a knowledge of each other that is its own kind of wealth. I’m not sure luck is the right category for that.