Sunday, March 24, 2019

First of all, I have to confess that it is somewhat disconcerting for me to see my mother’s photo on the cover of a book. I had thought that writing Mother’s memoir would be therapeutic. But it was not. I was only reminded of how much I had lost. My mother and I were a team, and now half of the team was gone. I have, for instance, never been very well-organized. My mother, by contrast, having worked as a bookkeeper for a number of years in Copenhagen, was extremely well-organized. Every year in late December she would sit down and note on the calendar for the new year all the important dates she wanted to remember: birthdays, doctors’ appointments, car insurance, CD renewal dates, and when tax payments were due. Before her memory began to fail, she would remind me when it was time to prepare our estimated Pennsylvania tax payments. In 2018, without my mother to remind me, I failed to make two consecutive quarterly tax payments. I am quite lost without her.

I might have put together a marginally better memoir if I had spent another few months on it––as it was, I completed it in just seven months. But I was working against a critical deadline. While I began writing my mother’s memoir, her sister, Anna Lise, turned 94. I wanted to have my mother’s memoir in her sister’s hands while she was still able to appreciate it. And, indeed, she received it by Christmas 2018.

Initially, I was not happy with the thought of spending my time writing a blog. But as I began composing several prospective blog entries, it occurred to me that Mother’s memoir would not have to be set in stone, as it were. In a blog I would be able to add to the memoir, including material that I had not thought of at the time I was writing. I failed to mention, for instance, how after the age of 70, when my mother began to suffer from high blood pressure, and I would take her pressure every day with an arm cuff, she would murmur, “Anna, Anna,” the name of her sister, in an effort to bring her pressure down. And it worked.

So my mother’s memoir will not be set in stone, after all; it can be a living, evolving document as I recall additional facets of my mother’s life.