![]() ![]() I’d change her into the faded, flowered cotton nightgowns she favored and then lie down beside her. I helped her use the toilet, brush her teeth and wash her face. ![]() My daughter quickly learned another fundamental task in our household - how to step around shards of glass while fetching the broom and dustpan.Īfter dinner, I got my mom ready for bed. Soon my mother began dropping plates, spilling drinks and breaking glasses on a regular basis. Her joy was bottomless, as she could not remember from one day to the next what developmental leap we had all witnessed the night before. She took delight in watching my daughter master skills - how to cut food, how to string words together to form a sentence - that she herself was forgetting. At first, my mother insisted on cooking, but after several charred pots of rice and open flames left unattended, we steered her toward washing vegetables and setting the table. Our family ate dinner together every night. By her second birthday, we had put our house on the market so we could move in with my parents to help care for my mother. By the time she took her first steps, my mother regularly forgot her granddaughter’s name. I delicately but steadfastly did not allow her to hold her granddaughter unless she was safely seated. Sometimes forgetful of the simple mechanics required to move her body, my mother was already shaky on her feet when my daughter was born. ![]() But in the last couple of years of her life, it was rare that my presence sparked even a glimmer of recognition in her eyes.ĭementia started stealing my mother away before my daughter got to know her. Almost every time I visited my mother in her assisted living facility, a staff member would tell me how much we looked alike. As I grow older, my hair grays, my features sharpen and the differences of color and youth that once told us apart fade away. During our visit, he spoke in painstaking English for the benefit of my bewildered companion, remarking repeatedly: “You remember your mother very much.” Many years ago, while I was traveling abroad with an American friend, my mother asked me to call on an old classmate of hers that I had never met. In Portuguese, my mother’s native tongue, there is one verb, lembrar, that means both to remember and to resemble or remind, the distinction perceived only in context. ![]()
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