The Eulogy My Mother Already Wrote

Mama’s right hand never came all the way back. She could grip a pen if I set it in just right, between her thumb and the heel of her palm, but her writing went from the neat, looping hand she’d had her whole life to something smaller and more careful, like a child learning letters for the first time, except it was a woman of seventy-nine relearning her own name.

She still wrote her grocery list every single day. I think it was the one thing that made her feel like the lady of her own house and not a patient in it. She would set it on the kitchen counter the night before, propped against the sugar bowl where I would see it first thing, and some mornings it was just what you’d expect. Milk. Eggs. Call about the furnace filter. Cottage cheese, the small curd, not the large. WD-40 for the porch door, which squeaked something terrible that whole last winter and which neither Greg nor anyone else ever came and fixed, though I mentioned it to him twice.

But underneath the list, some mornings, there would be something else. A line or two in that same careful, slow hand, like she had decided partway through writing about the eggs that she had something she needed to say and this was the only place she had to say it, because by then talking tired her out faster than it used to.

The first one I remember clearly said: Diane, thank you for not making me feel like trouble.

I stood in her kitchen and read that line maybe six times before I could put the groceries away. I did not say anything to her about it that day. I just put the list in my coat pocket instead of the recycling, and that night I bought a plain spiral notebook at the drugstore and started keeping them.

Over four years there got to be a lot of them. Some were just lists, no second line, and those I kept anyway because by then I could not bear to throw any of her handwriting away. Some had a line about the weather, or about a dream she’d had, or about my father, gone eleven years by then, and what he would have thought of something on the news. A few were about me. Not many. Mama was not a woman who said things straight out if she could say them sideways instead. But the ones about me, I knew every word of them by the end, the way you know a hymn you’ve sung your whole life without ever once trying to memorize it.