Planning

Ma's short term memory is something that has faded, if not altogether disappeared in the last two years, except when it hasn't. Sometimes she will pull something out from weeks ago that I would never have thought she would retain, but then she does. She asks about my friends often, and usually remembers a staggering amount about their lives, especially newer details that have happened in the last six months. Or that she wants to send someone a thank you note or she knows Matt is coming soon, just not exactly when. But ask her what she had for dinner last night or who came by over the weekend, and she's at a loss.  In an effort to keep her abreast of all her activities (and the comings and goings of my aunt, Matt, etc) I've hung a calendar next to her chair in the living room, which I've come to understand is really just for me, as neither Ma or my step dad ever looks at the thing.

For instance, Ma or Jim will say, "Now when is Matt coming?"
And I'll respond with the dates and then say, "It's on the calendar."
"What calendar?" Jim will say, and I will point to the one that has been hanging next to Ma for the last 18 months. "Oh. I guess it just never occurs to me to look there."
Then Ma will look over at it, as if it has been hung there moments before and say, "Oh! Ok. Now what day is it? Oh. Now when does Matt get here?"

And so it goes. The other day her friend Pat was over, and Ma was coveting her new planner, which was a lovely shade of green, with a pretty bird on the front and many inspirational quotes from Rumi and the like inside.  Here is where I must tell you that my mother has always been obsessed with organizing her life, and spent the better part of it in search of a planner that would meet her needs. No gadgets need apply, however, because Ma also loved to write. The action of writing most of all. She owned fountain pen after fountain pen to showcase her beautiful calligraphy-influenced penmanship, which I've always been a tiny bit jealous of. I've hijacked her Mont  Blanc, and have vowed to have it tuned up and use it soon, to the best of my ability.  She eventually settled on a Franklin Planner a few years ago, and used it with religious fervor until she lost the use of her right arm about a year and a half ago, thanks to that stupid fucking tumor that insists on growing directly onto the motor strip in her brain. Since then, she's been unable to write or organize anything, and until the other day, I didn't realize how much she missed it.

"I need an planner," she said. "Just like Pat's."
"Ok," I said. "When did you get that one, Pat?"
"December," she said.
When I tried to tell Ma that finding one just like Pat's would be slim to none, she just shook her head. "Nope," she said. "Just like Pat's."

So, being the fixer that I am, I embarked on a long and fruitless day of searching for a 2011 planner. It did not occur to me that it's April. I mean it did, I just didn't anticipate that there would be zero planners in every store. I sort of pictured bins of 1/2 priced planners everywhere, but everywhere apparently means February to the rest of the world.

My only option was a skinny, tablet sized calendar, on sale at Target for $3.83.  I brought it home and gave Ma the news. "Listen," I said. "If you live until December, you can have your pick of planners. Right now, this is it." She picked it up and shrugged. She was right, it was not an exciting calendar in any way. But she could at least flip through the months if she needed to see what was happening next month, something she couldn't do with the one on the wall.

The next morning, I put a few major events on the new calendar and showed her.
"It would be nice to mark off the days," she said. "Then at least I could tell where I was." She paused.  "I think yesterday when I was looking at Pat's planner, I sort of forgot I couldn't write." She found this vaguely hysterical.  The forgetting of it, that is.
"I wondered what you were going to do with that planner," I said. "But I didn't want to point out the obvious, given your love of all things planner-oriented."
"You knew and you didn't say anything.  That was nice of you."
At the end of the day, there was a shaky, off-center "X" over April 1st on the new calendar. "Ha!" she said.
"Nice work," I said.
"God that was fucking HARD, making that X."

Since I had just purchased a 5-pack of highlighters in various colors, I offered her one, under the guise that maybe just making a blob over the day would be easier. She chose green, and I'm happy to report, is moving right along through the month.

When she first lost the use of her arm, it was one of the only times I really saw her angry about what was happening to her, most of it directed at her guru. "Fucking Maharajji," she said. "I was so pissed. I couldn't even look at his picture when Clem when limp. (We call the arm Clem, Clem the Claw, actually, as the wiley limb has the habit of catching on everything, belt loops, sweaters, under Ma's thigh, etc.) "But after a week or two, it passed," she said, "and I accepted that it's all part of this process, because really, there's very little that I can do about it."

A few times in the last couple of days, she's tapped the calendar and nodded at me. I know her well enough to interpret that what she means to say is that this tiny, tiny bit of control is making her feel better, and she's again let go of the fact that she can't write - transcending a loss most of us can't begin to fathom with the rarest kind of grace.