Yesterday I drove from Massachusetts to Ohio to retrieve my Mom’s ashes from the funeral home and to spend the weekend sorting through her belongings.
One of things I asked my sisters to set aside for me as they started clearing out my Mom’s house was my mother’s diaries. When I was a kid, my Mom regularly wrote in a series of five-year diaries: the tiny kind with a clasp and sometimes even a lock and key. Every day, my Mom wrote one or two lines about the chores she’d done, the errands she’d run, or the birds she’d seen, and whenever a question of dates came up–when exactly did we see last year’s eagle, for example–my Mom would page though her diary to find the exact entry.
My sisters didn’t find any of those tiny, five-year diaries, but they did find a large daily diary that Mom used occasionally from 2003 to 2008, with each year’s entry following directly after the previous one. It is completely typical of my Mom that she would try to get the most usage out of each page, turning a full-page diary into a makeshift five-year one.
I am thrilled to inherit this diary: it alone is worth yesterday’s twelve-hour drive. Neither of my parents were remotely bookish, but I like to think that journaling is one thing my Mom and I had in common. I’m not sure why my Mom kept a diary–her entries are brief and boring, filled with mundane details nobody else would care about–but I am touched beyond words to have this piece of my Mom’s daily life–the things she decided were important enough to record–in her own hand, before her mind failed and her sphere of interest shrank even smaller.
In her memoir When Women Were Birds, Terry Tempest Williams describes inheriting her mother’s journals after her mother died. Bracing herself for the emotional minefield she expects to encounter within their covers, Williams is mystified to find all the carefully shelved volumes were blank.
Mormon women are encouraged if not expected to keep diaries, so Williams cannot understand why her otherwise devout Mom failed to meet this particular expectation. In my case, I’m mystified in an exactly opposite way. Without any social or religious expectation for her to do so, why did my otherwise non-bookish mother decide to chronicle her daily life?
It is unnatural to write without an audience, which is why so many diarists invent a persona for their notebooks: “Dear Diary.” It is easier to write–to speak your mind–if you have a specific audience in mind: your future self, your child or children, or posterity writ large.
This last one is the most elusive, and it is where journal-keeping and blogging overlap. There is more than a bit of arrogance to believe anyone other than you cares about your day, your thoughts, your feelings. For me, I’ve always had the irrational belief that the page itself cares–that if you take care of the page, that page will accept and guard over your innermost thoughts without judgment. Like a true friend, a diary is a keeper of secrets.
This is the mystery of my Mom’s missing diaries. If my Mom was writing for herself, she would have kept all of her diaries, not only the most recent one. My Mom kept everything, as my sisters and I are discovering as we sort through her belongings. The fact that my Mom kept the playing card collection she started when she was a teenager and multiple copies of every newspaper article that ever mentioned me is proof that she was an effective archivist: a hoarder of ordinaries before I ever thought to do the same. So either my Mom threw out her tiny five-year diaries by accident or on purpose, and now that my Mom is gone, I’ll never know.
This loss of words saddens me, even though the contents of my Mom’s diaries were not profound. Words keep our secrets, and we should guard them in return. My Mom was an archivist of all sorts of random junk, and I am an archivist of time. Now that she’s gone, I can’t stop wondering what happened to my Mom’s missing days.
Hoarded Ordinaries 