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of things, if only she could remember to write things down and stick the Post-its somewhere. And then remember to look at them.
    There were house keys, which made me feel such grief that I had taken away her freedom. But my mother had an unbelievable life for someone so sick with Alzheimer’s and Type II diabetes, and so poor, for as long as my brothers and I could pull it off. We helped her have independence and a great view, and her cat, and her friends, until the very end. When we put her in the home, her freedom was gone anyway. She had only the freedom, when the nurse left at night, to fall when she tried to get up to pee; to lie in wet sheets; to get stuck on the balcony and not remember how to get back in.
    There were mirrors in her purse, so she could see that she was still there: Am I still here? Peekaboo! There I am. There were a dozen receipts from Safeway, which was right across the street from her retirement community. She was supposed to be on a strict low-carbohydrate diet to help control her diabetes, but every single receipt was for bread and cookies, which she’d sneak out to buy when the nurses or I were off doing the laundry. I kind of like that in a girl. She also bought dozens of tubes of Crystal Light, intensely flavored diet drink flakes you mix with water. She must have hoped they’d fly straight into her brain, like Pop Rocks, and energize it like Tinkerbell.
    There were a number of receipts from our HMO in her purse, handed to her over time; she had been told to hold on to them until she was called, and so she did, because she was a good girl. She loved the nurses, and she loved her doctor, so the receipts were like love letters she’d never throw away. She had a card with the direct line of a nurse who helped her clip her terrible rhino toenails. People always gave her special things, like their direct lines, because she was so eager and dignified and needy, and everyone wanted to reward and help her. People lined up to wait on her, to serve her, her whole life.
    There was also a large, heavy tube of toothpaste in the purse. Maybe she had bought it one day at Safeway, and never remembered to take it out. Maybe she liked people to sneak peeks of it in her purse: it said of her, I may be lost, but my breath is fresh, or could be. There were three travel-size containers of hand lotion, a lipstick, a compact, and six cards from cab companies—Safe, Friendly, Professional. Just what you need in this world. She could always get home when she got lost, which she did, increasingly.
    I kept putting off opening her wallet. There would be pictures inside. Finally I opened it, and found it filledwith cards. She had library cards from thirty years ago, membership cards for the Democratic Party and the ACLU and the Sierra Club. There were two credit cards, which had expired before her mind did. She had an insane, destructive relationship to money, like a junkie. There was never enough, so she charged things, charged away a whole life, to pump herself out of discomfort and fear. She assault-shopped.
    There were photos of my nephew Tyler, my older brother’s son, and of Sam. She loved being a grandmother. And there was an old picture of herself, a black-and-white photo from when she was twenty-one or so. She was a beautiful woman, who looked a little like Theda Bara, white face, jet-black hair. She had dark eyes, full of unflinching intelligence and depression and eagerness to please. In this photo, she looked as if she was trying to will herself into elegance, whereas her life was always hard and messy and full of scrabbling chaos. Her frog-stretched mouth was trying to smile, but she couldn’t, or maybe wouldn’t, because then she would look beautiful and triumphant, and there would be no rescue, no one to help or serve or save her.
    She’d kept all of her cards from the years she spent practicing family law in Hawaii—a state bar associationcard, and her driver’s