Kathie GagneIt’s been over a thousand days since mom died and I am still finding scribbled, unsent letters and postcards of hers in manila folders and spiral notebooks that seem threateningly infinite. I frequently curse her for not adding dates to things, so many, many of them are impossible to fix in the timeline of her too-short life.

One thing that makes me happy, though, is just the sheer quantity of empty pages she left. It sounds anti-intuitive, I’m sure, but she and I shared — and, to be fair, she is the one who instilled in me — a great love for writing, and writing implements, and new paper. There’s something profoundly hopeful about buying a new notebook.

In this I will begin my great American novel …
This one will hold letters to my great-grandchildren …
I can use this to record ideas for short stories …

I know those are the sorts of things she was thinking when she purchased yet another exquisite leather-bound journal or $1.99 college-ruled Walgreens notebook. I know because those are the sorts of things I think. And even though so many of them contain three pages of her lovely handwriting and 197 pages of blank space, it still brings me such joy to imagine the thrill she felt in line at the book store, and to know that for those few minutes she was sublimely hopeful and happy.

Here’s a few pages I found in an undated notebook of hers. Based on some of the content, she must have written them at some point between the Fall of 2010 and the Fall of 2011, but that’s as specific as I can get. It’s probably hard for anyone but me to recognize it, but the plague of commas — which I know she abhorred — is a sure sign to me that she was suffering from some sort of mental problem by this point. And the title of this entry is taken from what she had written on the inside back cover of the notebook. Just those three words.