I like to imagine that I will be your cornerstone, a reminder of what was. The old building crumbles away, and yet there I will be (me, my life, our life) like when you were assigned time capsules in school. Remember? You both were in elementary school and were asked what you would take to leave on the moon. And then your children did it again with the turning of the century, and asked us to write a letter about what has changed in our lifetime. Your father wrote a lot! And he even made a timeline about all that had changed about cars and appliances, the telephone and the mail.

I have been writing notes and saving bits and pieces since long before you both were born, my attempt at explaining my life to myself, perhaps. I have so little of my own mother and have spent much of my life yearning for more. This habit of mine, trying to hold on to those days, was simply a way to reassure myself and to recall every detail of her—all I knew of my parents’ life together and all I knew of her death. I was afraid of forgetting, a fear that has never diminished, and now I am forgetting things. There’s no denying that I am forgetting. We all joke about it at a certain age (you will, too) but there’s a line you cross when you don’t talk about it in the same way. I am 85 years old, so what do I expect? You’re all grown; your children are even grown, so what do we expect? That’s what I keep saying to your father: “What do you expect?” We have both already moved past the estimated life expectancy for men and women in this country. We have both long passed the ages our own parents were when they died.

Sometimes, I feel like my life is all laid out before me: dots connecting, patterns shaped and designed, words naming and classifying me. We all have those moments when we are so aware of where we are; there are the moments when we feel graced and blessed, and there are likewise those when we say, “What am I doing here?”

I have tried to imagine my mother on that last night of her life. Surely, she asked, “What am I doing here? Oh God, what am I doing?”