This morning, after showering and rubbing various oils (locally made magical concoctions) on my face and lotion on my limbs, I noted three small red spots under my left eye. They’ve been there for days and I’ve no idea what caused them to appear. But today, they reminded me that when I was a kid and would get feverish, little red dots would appear all over my brown cheeks, like freckles. It was a visual clue to my mom that I was unwell.

From there, memories of mom started percolating—how she would rub Vicks on my chest when I was sick and resting in bed. How she would come to my side when I screamed in pain from earaches or growing pains. Her patience bordered on saintliness. That’s how I remember it. I don’t know what her actual feelings were. And when I put myself in her place, a seven-year-old literally screaming about her earache in the middle of the night, I feel like my patience would shred quickly and it would show.

Today, we’ve been in quarantine for just over a month. Living in Vermont and being able to do my work from home with few problems, I feel endlessly grateful. We have space, places to walk with no concerns about them being crowded, a pantry of food. I do my work in the sunroom and I’m surrounded by light and quiet, except the bird sounds that I love. It is a place of tremendous privilege and I remind myself of that every day. This time last year, I was with mom as she was entering into her last week of life. I imagine how she would respond to being in lockdown from the pandemic. How we would fret over the fear of her being exposed and how much we missed shopping at TJ Maxx and how Trump is an imbecile and how David was making her crazy. It would be terrifying to have her, in her compromised state, also living through this dangerous, easily transmittable virus. Thank goodness for very, very small (minuscule, teeny tiny) mercies.

And remembering her cough that last week of her life—it wracked her, turned her face maroon as she coughed so hard she could hardly catch her breath. The cough, I believe, was from the nodules scattershot on her lungs. It was so bad one night I called the hospice nurse on call. I felt that someone in hospice shouldn’t be suffering in this way—isn’t that what hospice was to help with? Before the call, I had given mom all the medications they had recommended to help with the cough and by the time the nurse came to the house—after midnight—mom was, thankfully, sound asleep. I felt like a dope for calling the nurse after all (who had been 30 or 40 minutes away), but the people who work for hospice are also saints, basically, and she provided guidance about how to help mom when such coughing jags start, and emphasized the importance of calling whenever I feel I need to. When I think of the cough that people have with COVID-19 and the inability to breathe, I think of mom’s coughing experience. It’s terrifying and heartbreaking.

This post has meandered a bit from my original intention. And even my original intention was not totally clear when I started. I read yesterday that everyone should be keeping a journal during this time to capture their experience of the pandemic. I’ve been doing that a bit with the journal I always keep. The recommendation was, if you aren’t accustom to writing a lot, to simply jot down your thoughts and feelings about the day, or maybe note the things you did.

I find myself thinking more and more about mom and all the memories I have of her and also all the memories of her I can’t possibly remember, if that makes sense. I’m reading a book called Separation Anxiety and in it, the mom has a son who is reaching that age when he’d rather be with his friends and finds spending time with his mom tedious and boring. When he was a child, they did everything together. She mourns this change and said she wishes she could tell him that life won’t always be like this—he won’t always have his mom and dad there in this way. It made me think of mom—we used to go shopping every week at a place called Value City. We would get dinner and go shopping. If I was in a mood (which was nearly always when I was a teenager), she would remind me that one of these days, we wouldn’t be able to go out like this together, that these shopping days would be a memory, and she’d say I better enjoy it while I could. I don’t remember if that wisdom had the desired effect at the time. It can be difficult to get through the thick cranium of a moody, hormonal 16-year-old. But now I know she was exactly right. She was right about everything she ever instructed me in. (Happily, I did tell her that at some point in our grown lives.) I just miss her all the time. Not in a weeping, heartbroken sort of way (though that way, too, sometimes), but in a, I-wish-I-could-pick-up-the-phone-and-tell-her-what-she’s-missed sort of way.