As I write this in late September, October looms in the rearview mirror. It becomes more visible as it nears. Both months are my best days of living where I am seated on a runway of the natural world, her change in dress from suits of greens into colorful party clothes of crimson , and burnt orange, and green-apple, yellow, dancing to the buzz of male cicadas calling.

For me, October is all about the natural world’s shift from one season to the next . . . until a couple of years ago. It would forever be synonymous with an additional meaning—when a human life transitions from a season of summer to autumn that rolls into a peaceful sleep.

I usually have a few writing projects going on at the same time. At their inceptions, I think one or two to merit development, only later to have them shrink in worthiness. When I recently perused a list of documents I keep filed, I came upon one titled “List.” Its title didn’t ring a memory. I clicked on the file and read. I remembered. It was a list I had made two years ago, shortly after my mother had died.

Why do we make lists?

Perhaps we make them to recount, making us think that we’ve got a handle on things. In Joan Didion’s The White Album, she detailed a packing list that she kept taped inside her closet door in case she needed to pack quickly for a last-minute trip. It’s simple, yet revealing as she dealt with a period in her life when difficulty of making sense of events surrounding her made her very nervous.

Lists make our life feel manageable and in order. They offer boundaries, giving us a sense of control when perhaps we feel out of control. And they can affirm what we already know. I find they also serve as timekeepers. A to-do list seems to always be on the clock.

Yes, lists are a telling of ourselves. They can detail where we travel and when, what we eat, and who we need to see. Think itineraries, grocery lists, social agendas, schedules.

But what about a list not of self, but about someone else?

“List” wasn’t one I had made about me. It was a catalogue, where I grouped items in chronological details. They had no time stamp; I never wanted to forget them. “List” was details about my mother as her life was coming to an end during the months of summer rolling into fall.

A button-down cotton shirt in pink and white gingham, sleeves rolled up
Deep pink short sleeved shirt underneath
White pants
White sneakers, white socks
Timex watch, red band, big numbers

Cardiomyopathy – broken heart syndrome – pandemic
Oncologist: “months”
“Why am I going to PT if I’m not going to get any better?“
She could walk then

Green toothpaste, pink plastic cup, lamp pole. Colors and light to see. “It’s dark in here.” New flannel nightgown, so cold. New long-sleeved shirts to fit. New towels in mint green, favorite color, she didn’t care

Outside yard
Jackie-O dark sunglasses
Straw hat
Brown, sparrows and squirrels, bird-feeders, trees that need pruning, under the shade of one I didn’t know the name, yellow slender leaves float, settle on her shoulders and lap

No television, can’t hear on the phone
Stopped walking
Walker to wheelchair, to the bathroom by shuffling her feet. Tried to get herself on the toilet. “I should be able to do this myself”

Fussed, cleaned, straightened, I tried to make it all better or comfortable

Why didn’t I just sit, still, talk?

No longer eats
Only slices of a, juicy, pulpy orange, so delighted! Taste! Dripping down her wrist

Blank eyes
Bony Shoulders
Looked to her bed as if to say I want to go there. Fought to stay awake.
Too many people, too many questions, conversations can’t follow.
She was so tired.

“I want to die”
“What happens if I don’t take my pills.” Why didn’t I tell her it would be okay if she didn’t want to take them anymore?

I understand now that making “list” was my way of tackling an emotional spectrum defined by grief. It revealed a life story about my mother; it was her identity. Reading it was to check-mark the memories of her as I soldiered my way to closure. It was my way of trying to make sense of those ending days.

When I went back and read the other files, I realized that most documents weren’t in the form of stand-alone paragraphs that didn’t lead anywhere, but were in the form of lists. I smiled in revelation that the recordings were my triggers in memory of a place, a time, an experience. And that how characteristic it was of me as a writer to compose this way.

Lists are my “notes to self,” where I can also find a note about someone else. “List” was so that I could remember my mother’s life, once dressed in the brightness of a summer in pink and white, that had ended in a brown autumn of her peaceful sleep.

October is a good month to revere a seasonal change of the natural world, in all its movement and shape and dress, and to note of a time when human life transitioned from one world into the next.