I’ve never liked New Year’s Eve. As a kid I always felt like I was losing something, though calling that something a four digit number seemed inexact, except that naming things is always inexact, is always a poor representation of what a thing is, whether that thing is alive or a collection of memories, in this case.

That is really what I was mourning for these past fifty-seven eve’s, a set of memories bounded by a trip around the sun, a set of memories I’d often have rather forgotten, perhaps, but I’ve never seemed able to forget the things I want to forget nor remember the things I want to remember.

I’ve given myself twenty minutes to write today, my hard twenty as I’ve called it, which in this case is a pretty solid name, even more so as I think back on the last twenty days, which have been a hard twenty, starting twenty days ago when my mom fell and broke her right arm and her back.

So much of the hard about these twenty days has been assisting my mom through a new world of dependency on others, one where her memory slips in an out of the fabric of her life, somewhat like an old sewing machine, the type that only ran when you pumped the pedal, where the fabric only moved when you pushed it yourself, where you needed your arms and legs to drive the needle through the cloth, where the necessary binding could also fail from a broken thread, from a bobbin mis-wound such that you might sew for seeming hours but have nary a tight stitch to hold it all together.

And holding it all together is the goal, so to speak, though what all together means has changed so much for her these past twenty days, so much for me as well, trying to be present in a world that seems often barren, where I might be the only person to sign the guest log that hour for a facility that holds two hundred souls, where so many, many people are lying in beds with televisions on to game shows and infomercials and the nurses station is surrounded with various wheelchairs and carts and tables full of white styrofoam cups of ice water and plastic straws.

I bring coffee in each morning at 8:00 and sometimes catch a therapist, sometimes there in time for mom’s food tray being delivered, in time to cut her toaster waffle pre-drenched in syrup, in time to wonder whether memory is a choice, a curse, a blessing, or all of the above.