My name is Sara. I am my mother’s third and last daughter. My mother has three types of dementia – Alzheimer’s-type, frontal lobe, and vascular. It seems that when people learn my mother has dementia one of the first things they ask is “Does she still know who you are?” I guess that is what people will think will be the most devastating to them, the thing that will just make their heart shatter, the turning point where they say well that’s it, I am officially really upset now.

Today I visited my mother, and she met me with unusual indifference, and I figured out she had no idea who I was, and you know, really, it wasn’t the most suffocating thing that has happened. I mean sure some tears came rolling out of my eye holes as I was driving home, and shortly after I got home I assumed the fetal position on the kitchen floor while my husband sat next to me and our newly adopted dog applied her large, cool, moist, dog nose to my head trying to figure out what part of me was broken, but I think maybe this didn’t stab me in the heart as deeply as some other events on this journey. Maybe because I expected it would happen someday.

Ok, it happened, check.

There have been things that have cut me deeper. When neither one of my parents remembered it was my birthday. Or eight years ago, in the beginning, when she would mock me, or when I would try to talk to her about my concerns and fears about my new baby and she would roll her eyes at me and reply “Whatever.” Or the first time I had to wipe her. Or also in the beginning when I felt like I kept pulling a fire alarm no one wanted to hear and I would say to my family “I think there is something wrong with Mom,” and I would hear back things like you are wrong, you don’t know what you are talking about, mind your own business, etc. That pretty much sucked too.

I attended a program by Martha Borst, who is awesome by the way, and she had this whole thing about “being right.” Looks like I was right about Mom. There IS something wrong with her. But Martha would say “Oh you want to be right? Yay! You were right! Congratulations! Now what??”

Now what.

My mother's indifference to me today was unusual because prior to that when I came around she would want to hug me and say "Oh it has been so long!" Even if it had just been a few days. Today she regarded me like the mail carrier. Or someone passing by her in the grocery store. And I was like come on old lady, we have history, throw me a bone here. So I asked her - "Do you know my name?"

Mom's frontal lobe dementia affects her emotions, and her ability to use language, so I wasn't really surprised when I got an answer that was nonsensical. Later I tried again, not so much hoping she would say "Of course I know you! You are my babygirl, and when you were born, and the doctors put you in my arms, I looked at you and I knew what Mary must have felt like the first time she held Jesus." Because she used to say that to me. No, I tried again hoping to get at least some little spark of connection with her again. But instead I got garbled language and fragments of delusions from her childhood.

As we were sorting buttons later I smiled at her like she had won a prize and said  “Hey. Did you know that I am your daughter??” She was flabbergasted. “It’s true,” I told her. “My name is Sara. And I am your daughter. You have three daughters and I am your youngest. The baby.”

Wide-eyed, she said “I have to sit down."

And so she did, and I tried to tell her brief little stories about her children and our life, and how amazing she was, and she sat there looking at me like “you have got to be shitting me.”

But no, I wasn’t. And by the time I had gotten into my car, and backed down the driveway of my childhood home, she had already forgotten everything I had said.