Page 45 of The Affair
“Oh, yes. Your mom said she’d pulled those out before she left.”
“You’ve spoken to my mom?” I asked, trying not to sound jealous, but clearly, I was.
“Oh, yes. We spoke when she got there. I wanted to make sure she’d arrived safely. And then I checked in a little while later. But I haven’t heard from her in a week or so.”
That was alarming.
“Do you think everything is okay?” I asked.
“Oh, I’m sure she’s just adjusting.”
Aren’t we all?
“So, are you going through the journals? I’ve always meant to, but there were just so many; it seemed a bit overwhelming. Plus, my mom’s life wasn’t overly interesting.”
Tell me about it.
“That’s actually kind of what I wanted to ask.”
“Oh?”
“I’ve been transcribing her journal entries.”
“Transcribing?”
“Entering them into the computer, saving them on the cloud, so they will preserved in case something ever happened to the actual journals.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful.” Her voice was soft and full of something I couldn’t quite pin. Gratitude maybe? “Thank you so much for doing that. I would have never thought of that.”
Me either, I thought, remembering it wasn’t actually my idea in the first place.
But I moved on, wanting to get to the reason I’d called her. “While transcribing one of the journals, I’ve begun to notice a pattern.”
“A pattern? What do you mean?”
“Well …” I began to stumble on my words. It was one thing to realize something, but it was something else entirely to explain it to someone else, especially when that someone else could take it the wrong way. “This particular journal was written when Grandpa was in the nursing home, and I’ve noticed that Nana doesn’t mention him much.”
“Oh.” It was a simple word, but the way she said it carried weight.
“It’s just … I remember visiting during this time. I know she went to see him every day. Do you know why she doesn’t mention it in her journal much?”
There was a long pause. It was a foreign concept for my aunt—the idea of silence. Usually, she was anything but, and I was always trying to find ways to shut her up.
This was sort of alarming.
“My mom was a woman of very few words—as you might have noticed by now. She wrote the facts, and that was about all. She rarely spoke her feelings, and when it came to Dad, well, there were a lot of feelings. I don’t know all of them, but I know a lot of pain and sacrifice goes into caring for a spouse for that long. His disease was slow; it tore away at him, bits and pieces at a time. Alzheimer’s is a terrible thing—for everyone involved.
“By the end of it, she was a stranger to him. Not a wife, not a friend, not even a companion. Just a stranger. It was a lot for her to cope with. Halfway through, it started to be too hard for me to visit, but your nana, she never wavered.”
“I remember visiting Grandpa with her when I was a teenager. By then, he just saw her as the lady who brought him a candy bar every day.”
I could imagine her sad smile all the way from here. “She was that lady for a long time.”
“You would think it would have helped to write about it,” I said, looking down at the tattered journal on the sofa cushion next to me.
“She wasn’t like that,” she answered. “For her, the journal was a way to catalog the events of a day, not the feelings that went along with it.”
“But clearly, not all the events.”
