It’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 […]
At about eight in the morning on Monday, July 22nd, 2013, I called the law offices of Mathis & Murphy, P.A. to speak to Kelly Mathis about the Order to File Inventory I received at the end of last week. Katie Perez, his legal assistant, answered the phone and said that she was — coincidentally […]
I started writing my mom a letter every day almost immediately after she was admitted to Stewart-Marchman at the beginning of December. I printed bunches and bunches of photos of my son and me, and I included two or three photos in almost every letter. When she was transferred from Stewart-Marchman to the Psychiatric Unit […]
On November 11th, 2011, I sent my mom a card for Thanksgiving using the Apple Cards iOS app. It’s a great app to use for sending physical greeting cards to people that aren’t likely to enjoy an ecard. When I sent it to her, I really had no idea how much she was struggling. On […]
I recently found something my mom wrote and signed, dated June 7, 2010. It’s in her usual handwriting, and under her signature is someone else’s, listed as a witness. It reads: 6/7/2010 I, Kathleen A. Gagne, give permission for the following people to see my records related to my memory loss. Dr. Shoemaker Dr. […]
I still have access to mom’s old Yahoo! email account. In her “drafts” folder I found an email written to me but never sent: From: Gagne, Kathleen <djksolo@yahoo.com> To: Gagne, David Subject: Visit with Andrew Garver Sent: January 26, 2010 10:55 AM Dear David, I need you to put some money on one of […]
I found this letter that mom wrote on her old Dell computer hard drive. For some reason I think it is very funny. It reminds me of the old joke about the man at Yankee Stadium who keeps missing key plays in the game because he hears someone yelling, “Hey! Bob!” until he finally screams […]
In January of 2021, more than eight years after she died, I found a handwritten letter Mom wrote to me and my little sister about three years before she died. It was in an envelope with “Letters to Kids” scrawled on it. The letter itself is a photocopy, but I have no recollection of receiving […]
I was cleaning an old filing cabinet in the middle of March, 2013, when I found this letter from my mom: 1/12/09 Dear David, I’m writing to you to provide you with “exciting” information about my history. You cannot, at any time, accuse me of repetition! Ok, here goes: I was used to hearing […]
Mom was a big fan of writing letters. She wrote letters to politicians and newspapers, administrators and executives, friends and family. She loved the formatting of them and knowing the proper layout and simply the entire process of crafting an epistle, and so she did it frequently. Here’s a letter she sent to a law […]