She has kept everything.
That is the word for it, I think, though the clinical word is different and less accurate to the inside of it. She has kept the birthday cards from the 1980s. She has kept the receipt from a coat she bought before I was born. She has kept the letters, decades of letters, in a shoebox under the bed that I have moved three times on her behalf and have been asked not to look in and have not looked in, because the not-looking-in is one of the dignities I can still offer her, the privacy of her own archive, the right to keep things that are hers without having them assessed by the person who is starting to need to assess everything.
I will need to look in the shoebox eventually.
I know that. She knows that too, on the days when she is clear enough to know things she does not say out loud. There is a version of this reckoning that I can see approaching from a distance, slowly, the way you see something on a long flat road, the shape of it coming toward you before you can make out what it is. The sorting of a life into what stays and what goes. The decisions about the birthday cards and the coat receipt and whatever is in the shoebox that she has been protecting from my eyes since before I understood why protection was needed.
I am trying not to rush toward it.
I am trying to let her keep things as long as the keeping is possible. To resist the practical efficient version of myself that wants to get ahead of the work, to sort now rather than later, to be organized about the approaching thing rather than present to the time that is still here. The time that is still here is the shoebox under the bed and her in the chair and me beside her and neither of us saying the word for what is coming down the long flat road.
We talk about other things.
We talk about the coat, sometimes, the one she bought before I was born. She still remembers the coat. She remembers exactly what it looked like and where she bought it and what she felt wearing it, which was, she says, like someone who had arrived somewhere, though she would not have used those words then, she just knew it was the right coat and she saved for it and she bought it and she wore it until it gave out, which took many years, because she took care of things.
She took care of things.
I want that in the record. Whatever is in the shoebox, that first.
