I lifted it out and unwound the cloth, and I had to sit down in Granny kitchen chair, because I could not ever ask her about it now, and it turned out I did not need to. She had already told me everything, years ago, and hidden it here for this exact day.
It was a little handmade book. Granny had taken an old photo album and filled it, front to back, in her own hand, back when her hand was still steady and her mind was still her own. And it was not just any memory book. She had made a page for every single one of us. Every grandchild, every great-grand, each with our own page, our own photographs, and under them, in her careful writing, the things that only she knew about each of us.
I found my page near the back. There was a picture of me at about four years old, sitting on her lap, and under it she had written the day I was born, and how I would not go to sleep unless she sang to me, and the summer I broke my arm and stayed with her a whole month, and the secret we kept together about the broken china cup, the one I always thought no living soul but me remembered. She remembered. She wrote it all down, every small private thing that ever passed between just the two of us across my whole life, so that when her mind finally went, I would still have proof that she truly knew me, and truly loved me, and never once mixed me up with anybody else.
There was a note on the very first page. My doctor says my memory will go before I do. So I am writing you all down while I still have you up here, every one of you, so that when I cannot call your names anymore, you can open this book and see that I knew exactly who you were, and loved you on purpose, each one of you different. Do not be sad when I forget you. I did not forget you. I put you right here, where the forgetting cannot reach.
I sat in her kitchen and read every page, all of us, her whole family kept safe in her own hand against the day her head could no longer hold us. My grandmother is still living. She is down at the assisted living place, and most days she does not know me, and it has been breaking my heart in a way I never had words for.
I have the words now. I took the book to her, and I sat down beside her, and I read her the page about herself that I had added to the back of it. She did not quite know who I was. But when I read her the part about singing me to sleep, she hummed it, the very tune, from somewhere the fog had not reached yet. My granny wrote us all down so that we would never lose her. And I think, without meaning to, she left herself a way not to lose us either, just for a minute, in an old hymn, in a kitchen tin, where the forgetting could not follow.