Until last week, I had no idea an SE Ledger could be cruel.

I didn’t even know the letters SE stamped in the bottom right corner of Mom’s old ledger meant “Single Entry” until last week. Not until it was time to purchase a new ledger to replace her old one. When she bought her old ledger, they could still be purchased at office supply and stationary stores.

But not any more.

Computer accounting programs may have rendered those cloth bound, sturdy books obsolete for the general public. But not for Mom. At age 84, she’s determined to record  her monthly finances by hand following the same system she’s used since she started teaching in the early 1950s. Some months, her Alzheimer’s barely gives her the mental capacity to continue this routine that used to be as effortless as breathing, The disease certainly won’t allow her to adapt to electronic accounting.

So she had to have a new, Single Entry Ledger.

The saleswoman at our local office supply store showed me what they had in stock. “You could adapt it for single entry, ” she suggested. How do you explain to a stranger that your mother, who taught three decades of children to read and write and do math, that your mother, who showed you how to use her accounting system to you when you were but a child, that your mother who showed so many young minds how to adapt and change in preparation for the future, can no longer adapt to change, that she prefers to live in the past and do things as she’s always done them?

“No,” I said. “It needs to be a single entry ledger. She can’t adapt.”

Finally, we found a Single Entry Ledger in a catalog. But it cost thirty dollars. So I called Mom and asked if she wanted me to order it. “Thirty dollars!” she exclaimed. “Oh, my.” She paused for a moment and said, “Oh, go ahead and order it. I’ve got enough money, and I need a new ledger.”

The new ledger arrived a few days ago.

It’s been sitting on my desk, alongside the old one, until I take them to Mom tomorrow. The new one is a little bigger than its predecessor, but the rows and columns will be familiar enough to her. She’ll be able to record her income and expenditures, with help from me, for a few more years. I don’t like to look at the old ledger or the new one. They are cruel reminders of a cruel disease slowly destroying my mother’s fine and active brain.

Alzheimer’s.