I am recording the monthly bill payments in my mother’s check register. I cross out a number – I was supposed to subtract here, not add – and write in the correction. I look at the line above and realize I have put the amount in the date column. I cross that out, too, and rewrite it in the correct place. I review the page and notice that the only corrections are the ones I have made of my own work. All the entries made by my mother on previous occasions are flawless. 

My mother is sitting at my elbow, just sitting there, breathing the slow, labored breath of the elderly, not saying a word, but even her silence speaks volumes. 

“You cannot do anything right,” it says. “You are just one mistake after another.”  

I see another number I have written in the wrong place, cross it out, rewrite.

I am here because my mother has finally allowed me to help her with her bill paying after months of complaining that writing checks has become too difficult a task. She gave me power of attorney for her checking account a couple of years ago, but she has not been able to relinquish control until now, now that she knows she probably has only a few weeks left. 

We sit side by side at her desk, a massive oaken affair, the wood darkened to almost black after years of use. This is the desk that once belonged to my grandfather and sat in his study in the Brooklyn apartment where my mother grew up in the prewar years. After my grandfather died, my mother had the desk moved to our suburban house, and many years later, after she was widowed, it followed her to her senior living community and, finally, to her apartment in the assisted living wing.

The assisted living apartment is tiny, just two small rooms and a view of the parking lot. It is June and outside the trees are lush in their summer foliage, waving their deep shadows over the pavement when a breeze blows. Inside, the light is dim, gray – it is late afternoon and the apartment is on the east side of the building. In autumn, the parking lot view will be framed with the brilliant oranges and reds of the maple trees, but I imagine my mother will not be here to see the display, not this year.  She certainly hopes she will not. “If I’m still here by Labor Day,” she says, “I’m going to sue someone.” 

The apartment is tiny, but space has been made for the desk. In fact, it takes up a substantial part of one room. Its top is long and wide and along the back half sits a set of cubbyholes. They are stuffed with memo pads, monogrammed writing paper, envelopes, stamps, pens, every sort of desk item someone of the pre-digital generation might need. Except my mother can no longer get to any of it. Arthritis in her shoulders makes reaching painful, while her hunched-over spine makes everything farther away than it used to be. But still, each item sits there in its assigned cubbyhole, everything organized into its proper place. It’s the way my mother does things.

Over the last few years, after a lifetime of organizing things, my mother has turned her attention to getting organized for her death. She has created an indexed binder of “topics” containing all the information she imagines the family might need in settling her estate. She has distributed her possessions of worth – both real and sentimental – as well as most of her possessions of lesser value since there wasn’t room for everything when she moved to the senior living community, and even less when she moved into assisted living. But through it all, my grandfather’s desk has stayed with her. She has spent a few weeks now trying to find a home for the desk for after she is gone. Several times she has offered it to me, but I don’t see how to make room for it in my small house and don’t want to face the task of moving such a large, heavy thing. Other members of the family seem to feel the same. It is not an heirloom. It is a burden.

I have already accepted other smaller, more practical things – sturdy wooden bookshelves, a food processor, a set of wooden mixing spoons, a pretty quilt. There is also the Dutch oven I hadn’t actually wanted. 

“I have my own cooking pots,” I said, but my mother insisted.  “Take it. It’s a good pot, very useful.”

So, I shoved the heavy pot into a far corner of my kitchen cabinet and focused on organizing my books on my mother’s former shelves.

One of my mother’s last organizing tasks is to hand her monthly bill paying over to me. As it turns out, that first bill paying session is also the last. One week later, she is gone.

After my mother dies, we are grateful for the indexed binder she has left behind, and for the possessions already distributed. It makes things that much easier for us. There are still a few things to go through, however, including some boxes of family papers. My brother shows me a letter he finds among them. It was written by my grandmother to my mother during her first semester at college. “Dear Constance,” the neatly-typed letter begins, “Your annual allowance is to be $2000. This is to cover everything except medical bills, spectacles, laundry, and dry cleaning done from here.” The letter goes on to explain that my grandparents will pay my mother’s college tuition out of the $2000, leaving her with $800 a year for spending money, to be paid quarterly, with a possible advance on the winter payment to cover schoolbooks, if necessary.  In the letter, my grandmother tallies up expenses already paid, subtracts them from the annual $2000, and notes that a check is enclosed covering the amount still due. “CDK,” the letter is signed – three typed letters, my grandmother’s initials.

Dear Constance, I read between the lines, this is what you are worth to us — $2000.

It doesn’t take long to clean out my mother’s tiny apartment. There isn’t much and most of it can go to the thrift store. We keep a few miscellaneous items for ourselves – family photos, some books – and find a new home for the desk with a cousin from my father’s side of the family.

At home one day, I spy my mother’s old Dutch oven winking at me from its dark corner in the cabinet. I drag the pot out into the light, and its familiar green enamel surface floods my body with memories. I see the beef stews and pot roasts my mother used to make in it, the meat-and-potatoes meals of my childhood. I hear the pot bubbling away on the stove when, as an adult, I come home for visits, the familiar savory aroma filling the air. Welcome home, it seems to say. We are glad you are here.  But between the lines hangs the old message: You cannot do anything right. You are flawed.

I lift the heavy pot onto the countertop, and I remember my grandfather’s desk. I think about my mother coming home for vacation after that first semester at college and wonder if she has had to admit to her parents that she has overspent the first quarter’s allowance. The silent messages hang in the air. You are worth $2000, no more.  But there is also the comfort of family dinners in the dark green dining room of her childhood and of the solid oak desk still sitting in its familiar place in the study. Dear Constance, it says, welcome home. You are flawed. You cannot do anything right.

I have my own cooking pots, I know, but the Dutch oven is actually nicer than any of them – solid, well made. My mother had good taste and the money to buy nice things.  I could make a vegetable stew in this, I think. It’s just the right size. There is a butternut squash on the counter, onions and green peppers in the fridge, a can of tomatoes on the shelf. I have all the ingredients I need. I gather them together, grab a knife, and start chopping.

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