Notes On A Diary

It may have been the last thing on her list, but it was never left behind, even when she was away from home for a day, a week, it made no matter. Often enough in the past, it had accompanied her when she knew she would have at times to carry it when even a few ounces of additional weight would make a difference. When she had gone with her husband canoe camping and packs had to be portaged for example, on overnight alpine camping hikes, or on holiday vacations where they lived in cramped little wilderness cabins for weeks at a time, to be close to nature. There were times when she’d had to shelter her diary from rain and wind while writing into it each day’s reckoning.

She was meticulous about chronicling everything that happened during the course of a day. Well, perhaps, not quite ‘throughout her life’, since this hadn’t been a childhood, an adolescent or even an emerging-adult habit. She couldn’t recall when it had occurred to her that she felt like writing down a small and concise account of her everyday thoughts. She was a reader, so it was entirely possible she had been impressed by something she’d read. It was such a Victorian pastime. Hardly reflective of what people did in the era in which she lived.

But she had become devoted to that small, daily task, and each night before falling asleep, she would reach for that diary and record within it all that had occurred of note that day. Why she did that was beyond her; no one would ever be interested in reading her observations. It was a kind of mental discipline, therefore. And it had a certain interest; she could look back at any date previous to take closer note of what had occurred at an earlier time in her life. Trouble was, she was usually too busy to engage in that kind of recorded introspection, so that aspect didn’t quite make sense.

Her husband’s favourite observation was that such habits become ingrained simply because people were creatures of habit. Habit was comforting, emotional, certainly not particularly rational. So then, she owed her devotion to habit, not a very revealing or bright thought. For what was the larger purpose? It had once been a discipline of the leisured class, those with a classic education the literary and academic-inclined. She was none of the above.

On a smaller scale of everyday living, she could roam about in her diary if she so felt inclined, to jog her memory about something she’d planted in her garden. The successes and failures she mentioned were sometimes helpful. She was sometimes curious about year-to-year weather and comparisons were amusing. She occasionally ran across notes to herself in significant months that were useful. On a larger scale, she would simply prefer not.

She must have been around her early twenties when she first began maintaining a diary. Her first diaries - and fact was, she no longer knew where those early ones ended up - were written in those small, colourful booklets with “My Diary” printed brightly over the cover. Good for a year of scribbling. At some time she had ditched those and decided to use black-covered 8-½” by 11” lined notebooks. Each of those was good for at least three years of daily notations. She’d assembled quite a collection. She rarely looked at the older ones, but occasionally at those that dated from within the last ffive years. They represented a significant time in her life.

Why would she want to refer to what was within them? She might look through any of them noting the chronology and suddenly come across an observation, a perception, an accounting that would deliver a painful pang of regret. She wasn’t a masochist, after all. She didn’t need the help of her diaries to recall the things she would prefer not to recall.

Those events she would dearly love to lose, but they refused to leave her at peace with herself. The diagnosis that Erin, at age 15, had contracted diabetes. Her daughter’s illness, her hospital stay. Where her body's descent into metabolic breakdown had been halted, and she had been taught the fundamentals of self-care. But Erin resisted, she refused to accept the lifetime verdict of spontaneity removed from her future. The need to weigh everything she did, everything she ate, the constant blood tests, the never-ending doctors’ visits. Above all, the emergency trips to hospital so she could be re-regulated. She resented that imposition on her life, railed against the unfairness of it all, bemoaned the fact that all her friends were carefree and she no longer was.

That wasn’t a fun time, not for any of them. She and Peter had panicked the first time Erin had convulsions. They did all the wrong things, frantic to help, aghast at their daughter's unconsciously-violent flailing. Her blood sugar had plunged too low; Erin had injected too much insulin. She did that kind of thing, liked to play around with the insulin, inject too much and then 'compensate' by eating all the forbidden things that would send her blood sugar soaring. Her endocrinologist warned her time and again, after each of those wearying emergency-room trips, that she was weighting her future against a long life. But kids think they’re indestructible, and nothing they could say or do or promise or beg made any difference to Erin. She was born defiant and that’s how she died.

They had been so relieved when she found a really decent, level-headed man after all the others she’d brought home that were so obviously no match for her quick intelligence. He truly cared about her. So much so that he gradually, even before they married, took over the coaching they’d always done with Erin, to try to make her more aware of what she was doing to herself. Somehow, she didn’t mind it when Lloyd did that. She smiled her sweet acquiescing smile at him, and actually listened to him. By the time they married he knew as much as they did about helping Erin control her diabetes. And he took it seriously.

Not all that seriously, though, to prevent them from conspiratorially disregarding what the gyn-obstetrician and her diabetes specialist had warned, that she was under no circumstances, to think about having children. Her body, ravaged by years of neglect, wouldn‘t be able to withstand the hormone changes, the rigours that pregnancy would impose on her compromised system.

She rarely sees her grandchild. Lloyd did love Erin, she’s certain of that, but it had turned her stomach when before a full year had passed he married again. They had two children of their own now, and Erin’s daughter. She couldn’t blame her son-in-law’s new wife for wanting to shut her out. She’d probably behave just the same, wouldn’t abide the thought of an earlier wife, wouldn’t want to have anything to do with that earlier wife’s parents. It wasn’t fair, but life isn’t fair.

At first Lloyd had been good about bringing the child along for brief visits. And he had faithfully sent along the latest photographs so she could see how Erin’s child thrived, a loved child. She could see Erin in her motherless daughter, and the pain was so intense she could hardly make herself look at those photos, even though she had framed several of them and they hung prominently on her bedroom walls, alongside those of Erin at the same age.

Her bedroom, no longer their bedroom. No point brooding about it, but she couldn’t help herself. She was not fun to be around, and she could hardly find fault with her friends whom she now rarely saw. They’d done what they could to help her adjust. But none of them had experienced quite the downfall she had. She found she had nothing any longer to share with them. With their own ups and downs they managed to make a life for themselves. Her, not so much.

From time to time she would glance at those empty diaries. She’d bought a whole whack of those black-covered notebooks. They came in sets of five, cheaper that way, and last time she’d bought two packages. She had worked her way through the first set of five, and part of the second set was still neatly plastic-wrapped. They sat on her bookcase, neatly, tidily, among all the filled books, and her personal library of reading material. And when she last glanced in that direction and realized what the unused books represented in terms of years of writing, she thought wryly to herself, she would never fill them all. The empty notebooks would most certainly outlast her.

She could, if she really wanted, pick up the diary corresponding to the correct year and month and day, and read her entry that observed how odd it was that Peter had wanted to discuss a really peculiar subject; what did she think of the possibility of a man loving two women equally? He’d hastened to add that he had seen a film on his last business flight, and that had been the story line. It had moved him greatly. He wanted to know if she thought that might be possible, in theory, of course.

“Depends on the person, I guess”, not thinking deeply about it, not really interested even as an abstract imagining, it held no interest for her. “I couldn’t imagine it, myself. I mean, if you love someone, how could you match that love with someone else? It just doesn’t make sense.”

“No, no, I guess it doesn’t. But what if someone who was normal in all respects, had a long and fulfilling marriage suddenly discovered that he was attracted to another woman. And that happened despite that his feelings for his wife hadn’t changed one iota. Do you think that’s possible?”

“No”, she laughed, and poked his ribs. “I can’t for the life of me understand how you get yourself so emotionally involved in film plots. They don’t reflect real life. And they deliberately appeal to the wistful male longing to look around…”

He’d laughed at that. And then the subject was dropped.

But it was picked up again, at a later date. And then she knew it hadn’t been a theoretical query, months earlier, that he had been probing, trying to ascertain from her reaction how she might feel when he finally revealed to her that there hadn’t been a film with an odd plot, that it was himself he was speaking of.

“I wasn’t looking for anything”, he explained every so earnestly, a genuinely worried look on his usually placid face. He was responding to her disbelieving rejection of his revelation that he had been seeing another woman.

When he had tentatively broached the subject, obviously no longer willing to lead a double life, one she hadn’t even suspected, she had recoiled, felt her body turn cold and her face hot. He had reached out to her in a supplicating way, as though willing her to understand - and she had thrust his hands away from her.

Her head reeling, her mind numb, anguished, she had turned away from him. And, back turned, in a quiet voice had urged him to tell her everything. She needed to know everything. He was obviously alarmed at her reaction. How had he expected her to react? Rationally, to a purely emotional twist? He was telling her that the compass of her life had turned without her even being aware, and suddenly the props that held up the life as she knew it, had collapsed.

He’d pleaded for her understanding. He hadn’t meant it to happen. It just did. “Did it” she responded, head pounding, feeling that she needed to turn on him, lash him with her voice, tear at him with her fingernails, pound him with her fists, knock out of him the lies he was spewing.

That was then. The pain had dulled considerably, but not the raging feeling of betrayal; worse, the fact that he now had a new family, two infants he shared with a new wife, while she had been left with nothing. Bitter didn’t begin to describe how she felt, unable to shake the fog of misery out of her life. She had a right to be bitter, she told herself. She had nothing to anticipate, no hope for anything. Her future yawned before her, its great empty maw a brutal tease, reminding her of what she once had, had taken as her due. And now, nothing was due her.

What kind of life was that?

She tried, occasionally, to brighten up. Call one of her old friends, make a day of it, lunch and shopping and that helped for as long as it lasted. They all knew better than to venture enquiries. She returned the compliment, unwilling to hear anything that would tear her façade of indifference and leave her naked, revealed as a pitiful mass of self-pity.

It was, she knew, their old friendship that left her few remaining friends feel sufficiently indebted to the past that they would show up. Even when she presented herself with her old smilingly vivacious face, all made up and dressed to the nines, she was aware of that fog hanging over her. She knew they could feel it; it was a palpable presence.

She would enjoy her day out with her old friends, return to her home, putter about doing meaningless little things, prepare for bed, and reach for her diary. Her diary was, in fact, all she had left. It was her contact with life, with the life she’d had. Writing dutifully onto its pages was cathartic; oddly enough allowing her briefly to purge her body of all the resentment, the nauseating self-pity, the horrible regrets.

Finally, one day she set about collecting all those remnants of the life she’d led. Those she could find, in any event. She had ten in total, and she tossed in those that had never been written upon, those awaiting their quotidian turn. The fireplace whose use she had neglected for so many years now proved its utility. And as she watched each of those memory-deposits burn, one each day, until they were nothing but ashes, she gradually felt a weight of remorse, loneliness and sadness lift. When they were all gone, she felt vastly different. She felt naked but vibrant, alive. It felt good to feel like that again. She’d almost forgotten how it could be.

When, eventually, someone ventured to call police because she hadn’t been seen in public for an awfully long time, there were no more diaries, there was no more her. Life had held some promise for her after all, one that led a trifle more precipitously than for most, to that inevitable, final journey.

She understood finally that she had no need for companionship, because no one takes that journey other than alone.