Learning to Love Who Arrives as Memory Gently Leaves
My mother-in-law forgot my name yesterday, then remembered it an hour later with such clarity that I wondered if I’d imagined the blank look in her eyes.
This is how aging happens to the people we love—not in dramatic declarations but in small erasures, tiny defeats that accumulate like dust until one day you realize the parent who once seemed immortal now needs help opening jars.
The recognition arrives in fragments. The way she grips the stair railing tighter than she used to. The slight tremor in her hand when she pours tea. The longer pauses before she responds to questions, as if accessing familiar information now requires additional time.
I’m watching someone I love disappear incrementally while she’s still here, still laughing at Arash’s jokes, still insisting on cooking for us despite our protests. The person she was exists alongside the person she’s becoming, and some days I can’t tell which version I’m talking to.
Happy sees my struggle with her mother’s changes. “She’s still herself,” she reminds me when I express frustration at having to repeat the same story three times in one conversation. But which self? The sharp-witted woman who raised Happy with fierce independence, or this gentler, more confused version who sometimes calls me by her late husband’s name?
The hardest part is the math—calculating how much time remains while pretending time isn’t running out. Each visit carries new urgency because I don’t know which conversation might be our last coherent one, which story she might forget forever next week.
I watch Arash with his grandmother, unconscious of any decline, accepting whatever version of her shows up each day. His love is uncomplicated by comparison, ungoverned by grief for who she used to be.
Maybe that’s the lesson: love the person in front of you today, not the person you remember from yesterday or the person you fear they might become tomorrow.
What if accepting their aging is really about accepting our own powerlessness over time?
