For the Record

I have 118 text messages in my phone from my mom. I clean out my text folder from time to time, but of course I can't delete that thread, no matter what. I'm worried that someday when this phone dies I won't have them anymore and then what will I do? It's the last set of direct correspondence that I have from my mother. I can read her actual words to me, in her conversational tone, asking me all the everyday things she always asked me. I'm going to try to take some time one of these days and transcribe them so I have them in writing somewhere forever.

Every time I open my message folder, I see my Mom's picture next to that thread, with her most recent message highlighted. It actually reads this: "Worvfvjrdtitr    Worchestid e sauce. B N pp P."

I had asked mom why her sweet and sour ham always came out differently from mine. I'm pretty sure Worcestershire sauce is what she meant to say. Reading that message makes me feel so many things; I giggle a little bit because she could never say that word correctly, much less spell it, and it was always a little laugh we had between us. "The W sauce," she would say instead. But it also makes me so so sad, because she sent me that message on June 14th of last year, and it signaled the end of her fine motor function. In a few messages before it, she said she was having trouble texting. Only a month before that one, she detailed the outcome of one of the doctor visits - the one where the doctor said she had blocked eustachian tubes and they would get a plan in place to "fix" the vertigo. Of course, they couldn't fix the vertigo. It wasn't blocked eustachian tubes, it was CJD, and all those endless visits to specialists and ENTs and audiologists and physical therapists were a huge, gigantic, waste of time.

Sometimes I can function pretty well when I think about my mom in generalized ways. I feel sad, but it is manageable. When I look through those messages, though - the back and forth banter, the questions about my day to day happenings, the things that are as simple as sharing a recipe - I feel this crushing weight of sorrow; I can barely breathe. I can miss the idea of mom, and be okay. But missing my actual Mom is maybe the worst feeling I have ever had in my whole entire life.

I hold on to these messages with a fierceness I don't recognize in myself. I hold them because they are a tangible receipt of our relationship; physical proof of the closeness we shared. Sometimes I need the physical proof of it, when vague and cloudy memories don't suffice. They are also a record of her illness, in a roundabout way. In the early messages, she updates me on this doctor visit, or that one. This diagnosis; that prescription. As they go on, she gets more frustrated, and also more brief. When they stop altogether, at the W sauce, the abruptness of it reminds me once again how it felt to have her taken from us so early. She wasn't ready. I wasn't ready.

I wish more than anything that I had had the foresight to record more moments with her. I wish more than anything that our daily back and forth wasn't reduced to 118 messages, some of which are simple exchanges with only a word or two. I hope this blog, and the words I record here, will stand up over time. I hope someday my kids will read them and FEEL me. I hope I can remember to leave all the things here that they will need. I hope I can leave them enough of myself so that when I'm not here they won't have to miss me so much.