I’ve been going through my own head a lot about whether I was paying enough attention. I handle most of my mom’s day-to-day stuff. Appointments, medications, the facility paperwork, all of it. Gerald sends money occasionally, not a ton, and he visits when he visits.

I never thought that arrangement made me the one who deserved a larger share of anything. That’s not why I do it. But I also genuinely did not think it made me the one who needed to watch my back.

I talked to my mom again yesterday. She was having a harder day, less clear on things. I sat with her for a couple hours and we watched a game show she likes and she held my hand most of the time. At one point she looked at me and said my name correctly and asked if everything was okay. I told her yes. I don’t know if that was the right thing to say. It felt like what she needed in that moment. But I went out to my car afterward and just sat there for a while because I couldn’t figure out where to put any of this.

I have 17 days left now as I’m writing this. Mark is ready to file. I have the medical documentation of my mom’s cognitive state, I have a handwriting analysis contact he recommended, and I have a paper trail of Pamela’s employment and her relationship to the approving agent. Mark says that on paper the case is actually reasonably strong. He also said I need to be prepared for what happens to my family if I go forward with it. Not that he thinks I shouldn’t. Just that I should know going in.

Gerald hasn’t called me. He doesn’t know I know yet, as far as I can tell.

Or maybe he does and he’s just waiting to see what I do. I genuinely don’t know which one of those is true either.

I keep thinking about what my mom said when I showed her those two signatures. The way she looked at the second one, the one that’s supposedly hers, and just quietly said it didn’t look like hers. She wasn’t upset. She wasn’t dramatic about it. She just said it plainly, like she was identifying a stranger in a photograph. Like she knew that person wasn’t her.

She’s still in there somewhere. That’s the part that makes this so hard to sit with. She’s still in there.