Nancy Hepner Goodman

My mother recorded a litany of our names in cursive writing, Sarah Riley Kelly Josie Nancy Haley 6 Riley Kelly Mark Josie Rick&Sarah Alan Nancy Haley Gunnar 10. It kept her busy and the work was hard. She recorded the sum of a grouping, the number six or ten, then added hen scratches of math, 1924 (DOB) + 88 (AGE) to find her way to 2012. 

The cursive writing flowed all day long in spiral rimmed notebooks with black ink. Twenty-two lines to a page. She wrote when the hospice volunteer wasn’t reading her a novel she didn’t listen to, or the nurses aid wasn’t giving her a sponge bath, as she closed her eyes and pretended to be dead. 

Mom would ask how to spell a name she’d written a million times, as she reached for the spiral rimmed notebooks stacked at her bedside. She recorded Rick&Sarah as if they were one word, but counted them as two, while the rest of us stood alone, separated by white spaces. I sat with her as often as I could, but not often enough.

“Let’s get out of here,” she would whisper ….and with a spur of the moment mad dash, I dreamed of running with her in my arms, all the way out to the parking lot screaming “to hell with assisted living and Beta amyloid plagues.” 

She picked at the air, tossing and turning, one foot in the present and the other stepping towards heaven. She would ask if I was her mother. Her child’s face, full of disappointment when I said no. A soft, insistent voice in my head soothed me. She knows you are somebody important! 

After her memorial service, my brother framed ten of Mom’s written pages. One page for each of us.  A reminder of the importance of family. Tuesday, 2012 Aug 14 is mine. That day holds no special significance, just one of the many days in her last year. The work was hard and it kept her busy. I tried to be there as often as I could, but it wasn’t often enough.