A lot of my writing work lately has centered around my mother.

I recently finished transcribing her diaries onto my computer, a task that seemed more urgent as time sped by and my own age advanced. For more than fifty years she kept a day-by-day record of her life and our family’s life, usually in little five-year line-a-day diaries but sometimes in a one-year version and one or twice in a book that was also a calendar. I have all of the diaries in a small suitcase, and I know my daughters will take care of them after I’m gone, but I also wanted that record to be available to anyone in the family who cared to have it. Even if they never read the whole thing, with their computers they can search for a date or a name or a significant word and find a bit of forgotten history, or a memory of their own.

I began with the earliest entries, written in 1936, and continued through to sometime in the late 1970s. Then, for reasons of my own (more about that in a minute), I switched to her final years because I needed to know what was in them. Afterward, I went back to catch up from where I had left off, and not long ago I finished at last.

She always told my brothers and me that there was nothing in the diaries too private or confidential for us to read, and she was right. She was careful to write nothing hurtful, and even the most heartrending, cataclysmic events are told dispassionately. You have to read between the lines—or have your own memories of those times, as I do for many of them—to discern the joy or grief or fear or frustration she was feeling when she wrote about them.

Many of the entries over the years are just plain boring. How many church meetings, Bronco or World Series scores, grocery-shopping trips and hair appointments, how much ironing or gardening or sewing does posterity need to know about?  Yet they’re an important backdrop to the incidents and encounters, the ongoing family interactions, the crises that came suddenly and those that built up over time—everything that history, even a family history, is made of.

I thought I knew my mother and I thought I knew her life. But I had no idea, until I read her later diaries after I left home, how many of her activities in those years involved helping others, how others depended on her and sought her out, how responsible the positions were that she held in local life, how beloved she was. There is not a word of boasting or self-praise in the diaries, but the personality that emerges from her everyday life is heroic.

Now—and this is why I skipped ahead to her later diaries—I’ve been trying to write an essay about her final illness and her death, a time of such emotional turmoil that it’s hard to even think about. When she was in her mid-seventies, Mom began to change, as Alzheimer’s or something like it took possession of her mind and personality. I kept notebooks during that time, and unlike her diaries, mine seethed with emotion. I needed to read her own version of that interval after her illness began.

Reading her diaries for those years was as painful as I expected: the closing of the years when she was happy and healthy and living an active life, sliding down into the time when everything went wrong. I wish I could rewrite the ending to a life that had never been anything but good. I wish I could undo the things I did that, without my intending to, made it harder. Of course I can’t do either. But there is something unfinished in my mind about that time that I hope to come to terms with.