I’m spending the weekend in Crazy Questions house. My mother, Dorothy, has Alzheimer’s. It’s somewhere in the moderate stage at this point. She was diagnosed about three and a half years ago, but we’d known for a number of years by then that she had some serious memory problems. She was on Aricept for awhile, and is on Ryzadine now. That’s slowed it down, but she’s getting worse.

If you didn’t know something was wrong, though, it would probably take awhile to realize it. She’s good at hiding her confusion. Well, she used to be good at it. She’s not as good as she used to be. She’s slipping.

She can remember names. She remembers everyone’s names. She remembers names of people she went to school with 70 years ago. She remembers the exact type of cirrhosis of the liver that killed my aunt. I can’t remember it. It starts with a “b”, but that’s all I can pull up. She remembers all these details, but she’s losing the connections. She knows us all, but she’s forgetting why she knows us.

She asks how my mother-in-law is every time I talk to her. She asks how my mother-in-law is numerous times every time I talk to her. She often brings up how much she enjoyed talking to my mother-in-law when we brought her to visit several years ago, and she points out the chair where my mother-in-law sat. She also asks about my husband when he isn’t with me. She asks about him repeatedly. Yet last time they were at our house, she asked my husband where he lives.

A couple of months ago she turned to my brother and said, “Now, where do you live?”

My brother laughed and said, “Well, I live in that house right behind you, Mama!” We all laughed. But it’s not very funny. But we still laugh.

There are baby pictures of me and my brother hanging on the wall in the livingroom. Every time I’m home, she points out those pictures and tells me that’s me and my brother, and speculates on the color my dress was (pink or green) and the color his overalls were (blue or red). The pictures are black and white, so those colors are as lost as her memory. Sometimes I think I remember the outfits, although I couldn’t. I was just a baby. Sometimes I think they were one color, sometimes the other color. But she always points them out and she always talks about them. A few months ago she pointed out my picture, my pink or green dress, and I said, “That is a cute picture of me.”

“That’s you?” she said. “I thought that was Beth!”

“….well, yeah,” I said. “That’s me.  I’m Beth.”

“OH,” she said. And changed the subject.

When she said that, I remembered something that happened when I was maybe four years old.

I woke up on the couch in the livingroom. It was dark. It felt like the middle of the night. A radio had been playing in the kitchen, but suddenly the music had turned into an off-the-station buzzing. I think that’s what woke me up. My mother was giving my brother a bath. She’d left the bathroom door open, and I could see them in there, in the greenish light. She was kneeling by the bathtub, soaping up his hair.

“Where’s Mama?” I said.

“I’m right here,” she said. “I’m giving John a bath.”

“But… where’s Dorothy?” I said.

I can still, all these years and years later, remember exactly how confused I felt. I can still remember how my mother and Dorothy were, at that moment, two separate people in my mind. One of them was there; one of them wasn’t there. And I can still remember how suddenly everything clicked, everything slipped back to normal, I woke all the way up. Then it was just Mama giving John a bath in the tub at night, with the radio sliding back onto the station.