Keeping On

This afternoon I came upon check registers from a bank account my mother had from 1988 until she moved from Parma to Maryland, in 2005. In 1988 she would have been 66 or 67 years old, and still six or seven years from retirement. I see her paycheck deposits from that time, and I note the progression of her income in the raises she received over the years as the amount of these deposits steadily rose. I wonder what these paychecks would be worth in today’s dollars. I find out for the first time that The Cutting Room is name of the salon at which she’d get her hair done every week with religious regularity. I track the mergers and acquisitions of the supermarket chain she patronized, as the name she wrote on her checks for groceries changed at least twice during that time. I note with a smile that the spouses of children received the same amount of Christmas money in their checks as the actual biological children, but long-time unmarried life partners, such as Alex, were discounted some 40%. No surprise there—despite being divorced, my mother proclaimed wholeheartedly her belief in marriage. I fast forward to the later years, and I see the handwriting grow tiny and shaky, a terrible graphic testament to the Parkinson’s that robbed her of her vigor and eventually her life.

She was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2004, but she had confided to me a year earlier that she suspected she had it. It took her almost two years of doctor visits before any doctor was willing to make that diagnosis. These check registers show that she had it as early as 2001, and possibly sooner. I wonder if any of her doctors at the time had asked to see her handwriting. I wonder that I did not notice it on the random birthday card or Christmas card and hear an alarm bell—not that early detection would have cured the condition or even slowed its progression. The small, shaky script has been very hard for me to look at without a stab of pain since I first noticed it. Nevertheless, these check registers also give testimony to the fact that she soldiered on, despite all. I think I’ll keep them for now.