The Things We Remember

        My mother has had better weeks. The other day she called me to come close and told me in a conspiratorial whisper:  "There's something I have to tell you.  There are a lot of things I can't remember anymore."

"I know," I say calmly, repeating what I've been told by my Alzheimer's support group.  "Don't worry. You are getting older and that happens to a lot of people as they get older."

She shakes her head and says in a very low voice, "I don't ever remember this happening to my mother."

Her mother--my Nana, died at the age of 63.  Nana never used a cane or a walker and her health was almost perfect. My memories of her are all related to activity--cleaning house, washing clothes in the wringer washer, teaching me how to crochet.  She rarely sat, unless she was doing needlework.  Not long before she died, she went out in the backyard, mixed up a bag of cement in a wheelbarrow and poured out a garden path. The weekend before she died, she was out in the country with our family, gleaning vegetables from a field. The morning she died, she complained of a terrible headache. By midnight, she was gone.

My mother is almost 87 years old. She lives in a lovely facility where people have to remind her to have meals, to wear clean clothes, to go to sleep.  She often thinks I am her mother, and introduces me to others in that way. Some days, I'm her youngest sister, my Aunt Lindy.  How do I tell her she has long outlived her mother? How do I tell her, there's not much of a roadmap for someone her age? 

I am now eight years younger than my Nana was when she died. These seemingly important discrepancies in our ages are impossible to explain to my Mom. She wouldn't care anyway. She just wants to know why she can't remember things. Why, what happened to her Mother, didn't happen to her.