On the good days she is entirely herself.
On the good days she knows where she is and when it is and she looks at me with the eyes that know me, that have known me since before I knew myself, and she says something sharp and funny and slightly irreverent in the way she has always been slightly irreverent, the particular dry observation of a woman who has been watching people for eighty years and has strong opinions about what she has seen and has never lost the willingness to say so.
I have learned to receive the good days without clutching them.
That has been the practice. The good day comes and the first instinct is to hold on, to grip it, to look at her being sharp and present and herself and think: stay, please stay, let this be the new permanent, let this clarity be the sign that the fog has lifted and will not return. And the clutching ruins the good day. The clutching turns the gift into a vigil.
I am learning to just be in the good day.
To sit with her on a Tuesday afternoon when she is clear and funny and present and let the afternoon be an afternoon, let her be her, let myself be her daughter in the uncomplicated way I could be her daughter before the complication arrived. To drink the tea and hear the irreverent observation and laugh the way I laugh when she makes me laugh, the real version, the version that starts in my chest and arrives in my face before I can prepare it for company.
She made me laugh on Thursday.
About something that I will not put here because it belongs to the two of us and the Thursday afternoon and the particular quality of her voice when she is sharp and in full command of the thing she is saying. It belongs to the good day. I am keeping it there.
I will tell you this: I drove home from that Thursday and the driving was different. Lighter. The kind of drive where you arrive at your destination without quite knowing you were on the road, because you were somewhere else, somewhere warm, somewhere that had been the good day and was still the good day even though the day was over.
I am so grateful for the good days. I am learning to be only grateful, not watchful. Only there. Only hers.
