In Any Event
A sticky note from my mom
When my mother died and we cleaned out her room at her assisted-living home, I acquired a few books from her collection. One was a small volume edited by James Crews titled How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. I had heard of it, and I knew a few of the poets in it, so I put it in the plastic bin with the other things I was taking home.
It was curious to me that she owned this book.
It was published in 2021, so someone must have given it to her recently. We had moved her to be closer to us in 2019 when it became clear she was developing dementia and couldn’t manage on her own; among other things, she had been swindled out of a quarter of her yearly income by a scammer preying on people who were fearful and couldn’t track conversations.
About a week after I claimed the book of poems, I felt a craving for some gratitude and hope so I found it and looked at it more carefully. It appeared to be brand new: clean cover, spine uncrinkled and uncracked, no page corners folded over.
But when I opened it, I found a folded sticky note.
My mother was a sticky note fiend.
As a professor she did a lot of reading. She wrote on thousands of stickies, placing them on the edges of pages to remind herself of concepts, definitions, important pieces of legislation, different perspectives through which to consider human histories and flaws. She wrote notes to flag stories that were meaningful for her, words that triggered her, images that excited her. She used so many stickies on the page edges of her many books, they became feathers, supporting those thoughts in their ultimate flight.
I know this because I disposed of twenty boxes of her sticky-noted course books—ripping off covers and heaving them into dumpsters to recycle them.
In the final year of her memory loss, my mother wrote fewer and fewer sticky notes.
My sister and I found a final one together on that day we cleaned out her room. It wasn’t flagging anything. It was placed so we would easily find it. It told us she would always love us.
The sticky note in How to Love the World was blank and folded onto itself, a bookmark not a flag.
This is the poem it marked.
In Any Event by Dorianne Laux If we are fractured we are fractured like stars bred to shine in every direction, through any dimension, billions of years since and hence. I shall not lament the human, not yet. There is something more to come, our hearts a gold mine not yet plumbed an uncharted sea. Nothing is gone forever. If we came from dust and will return to dust then we can find our way into anything. What we are capable of is not yet known, and I praise us now, in advance.
A bookmark, for the event.
Through the fractures in everything, dust. Dust that I feather off the butterfly lampshade I inherited from you that now sits on my desk, dust that is you—inside the cardboard box inside the wooden box inside my house—dust that we intend to let fly off a mountaintop. That fractured star dust inspires.
I hope I remember to leave a reminder such as this for someone to find. Thanks, Mom.
This is special, Deb