Counting the Days, Weeks, Years

I’ve been thinking about my mom and dad a lot this week. It’s been 8 weeks and a day since Mom died. Yesterday would have been their 73^rd wedding anniversary.

When Forrest died twenty-three years ago, I counted the days since his death for a very long time. Eventually I kept track in terms of weeks, months, and years, then months and years, until finally it was just years. Lying in bed in the dark last night, I tried to figure out how many days Forrest had been alive. It’s carved in his gravestone, but I couldn’t remember. Forgetting felt like some kind of milestone. I wouldn’t have let myself forget a few years ago. I found a photograph of his stone this morning. He was here for 1266 days.

I remember Peter hunched over the kitchen table with calendars, pencil, and paper, counting the exact number of days Forrest had been with us so we wouldn’t give him too few or too many. There was even a moment when we thought, how can we stop at days? Should we account for hours too? In the end we decided to count his last partial-day as a full day rather than not count it at all.

My mother’s death feels entirely different. I can’t remember my mother as the vibrant woman that she was. My memories only include her recent decline: caring for her, making meals, occasionally lying down beside her when she couldn’t sleep. For six months before she died, Mom was ready to go. She was bored with dying. I told one of my sisters this week that I was sad because I wasn’t sad. A part of me wants to be sadder, to mourn the loss of my mother like others often do. But she’s gone and I’m grateful that she’s relieved of her discomfort and boredom, hopeful that someday her younger self will return to my memory too.

This is one of my favorite shots of my parents. They’re at Rockefeller Center at Christmas time seven years ago. They had a tendency to take off, take a train to somewhere, to do something they hadn’t done for a while. Both would have been in their late 80s at the time.