Im sitting here at my desk on a cold Friday night in January, settling paperwork for the new year and trying to get organized for the coming tax time. I’m my parents’ financial person and this means while they are living out their days in a memory care facility in Ohio, I am in California making sure their bills are paid and matters are in hand.

For me, that means logging into their gmail to make sure there are no missed yearend statements and continuing to unsubscribe from all the progressive, humanitarian causes and newsletters they subscribed to but never read anymore. It means checking the credit card statement and bank balance and then getting out my mom’s check book and files.

And then my throat tightens and tears prick. Because I see her handwriting in the checkbook ledger and remember what a stickler she was for balancing her checkbook every month. Even though she also checked her account online too. She had technology skills, she sure did. And I also see the cryptic notes written on scraps of paper in the files and on back pages of the ledger, on little post-it notes — reminders of passwords and what to do to login in, and what each account meant. Not your usual tips and tricks, but shards of thoughts from someone who was losing her ability to stay in charge — my mom’s favorite place to be.

I may be 3000 miles away, but who she is — and who she was — is right in front of me every day. Her memory loss. My loss. My memories.