For three years I kept a spiral notebook on the arm of the recliner beside my mother’s bed. The morning after her funeral, my sister Colleen told me that notebook was worthless, that I had been wasting my time, that I had always been Mom’s least favorite anyway. She said it the way you’d mention the weather. “You were the maid, Bridget. Maids don’t inherit.”

I had moved into our mother’s house when Eileen’s memory began to fail. For three years I measured medication, changed sheets, held her hand through the nights when she didn’t know me. I kept the notebook because a hospice nurse said dates matter. I wrote what she ate, which medications she took, when she no longer knew the season, when she called me by her dead sister’s name, and the good days too — the afternoon she suddenly hummed every word of a Patsy Cline song even though she couldn’t tell me my name.
I dated every entry. I kept four notebooks by the end.