She stayed at the table, folded her hands, and looked her brother dead in the eye. Then my daughter said, “Trent, go get the green spiral off Grandma’s nightstand. She would want you to read it and she cannot tell you so anymore.”
He said he was not going to go through his grandmother’s things at Thanksgiving.
Grandma has kept that notebook since 2011, since the first stroke, back when she could still write and could still be trusted to remember what day it was. Her doctor told her to keep it. It was supposed to be for medications.
She used about four pages for medications. The other ninety are visits.
Date, name, how long. That is all. In her handwriting until about 2019 and then in nobody’s handwriting after that, because after that she could not, and Kara kept it up for her because Grandma asked her to and because Grandma checked it.
My mother counted us. For fourteen years, my mother lay in that bed and counted who came.
Kara did not read the whole thing out. She read one page, October of 2016, and it is one line repeated eleven times down the page in an old woman’s handwriting, and it says Kara, evening, and then a number of minutes.
Then she turned to the back cover, where Grandma wrote the only paragraph in the book, in 2018, when she still had her hands.
I am not keeping this to shame anybody and I do not want it read at my funeral. I am keeping it because I am going to forget, and when I forget I want somebody to be able to tell me the truth about who sat with me. It is the girl. It has always been the girl. Tell her I knew, on a day when I cannot.
My mother was dozing in her chair in the corner while her granddaughter read that out loud.
Then Kara said the rest, and she said it flat, the way nurses say hard things.
She said she is an RN with nineteen years on a dementia floor. That she has held the hand of ninety-some people while they died, most of them with nobody else in the room, and that fluffing a pillow correctly is the difference between a pressure ulcer and no pressure ulcer, and that a bedpan is not the humiliating part of anybody’s day, being ignored is.
She said, “You are a doctor of teeth, Trent. I am the one who was in the room.”
My son did not say anything for a very long time. His wife was not smirking.
He got up and went and sat down on the ottoman in front of his grandmother’s chair, and he was still there an hour later when she woke up, and she did not know him, and he stayed anyway.
He goes Sundays now. There is a line in that spiral in his handwriting, most weeks, and Kara has never once said a word about it to him.
Mama passed in February. The notebook is in Kara’s kitchen drawer.
And I quit letting it ride. Nineteen years I watched my girl slip out of the room to do the thing none of us wanted to do, and I never once got up and went with her.