When my daughter was 18 months old, my mother turned to me and asked what her name was.

I was taken aback, somehow most by the idea that a grandmother would ever ask such a question. It was one of many such incidents as Alzheimer’s slowly stole the mother I knew. As I saw the confidante I’d known so well slipping away, I was continually more surprised and upset by the loss of my relationship with my mother than her losing memories and facts. As my mother, how could she ask me these things, even if she couldn’t remember?

There were bad days and better days. Some days my mother was in a wonderful mood, remembering the recent past fairly clearly, accepting the gaps in her memory with humour and grace. Other days, when she could still use the phone, she’d call repeatedly, not remembering that she’d already called or what we’d discussed. Before her driver’s license was revoked, she’d say she was coming over to play with her grandchildren and then not show up. And she was angry, understandably, and frustrated by miscommunications that she was eager to blame on anyone but herself. She claimed the right to forget anything that “wasn’t important” to her. She said, as a retiree, it didn’t matter what day or week or month it was.

When I was growing up, my mother would recount the best day of her life: the day I was born. She claimed it was a day she would never forget. Yet now it is forgotten. While she continues to usually feel familiar towards me, she sometimes believes I am her sister.

In recent years, I’ve seen less and less of the person my mother was. Not only have facts and memories evaded her, she’s also lost much of her personality, or what seems to make a person apart from memory: temperament, judgment, hobbies, interests. My once hardy and active mother now can’t bear to wear a wet sock for a few minutes. She panics and yells if she has trouble opening a door. At one time she would have been furious with my writing this down. But now she no longer reads.

As I seek to make some sense of how to lose someone who isn’t actually lost, I realize that the phenomenon of my mother does still exist in many ways: she touched thousands of students in a thirty-year career teaching English, social studies, and debating. She’s also woven into the myriad of social causes that used to demand her attention.

Ultimately, her greatest achievement for me is the woman I have become. There were so many ways in which she molded me over the many years before her illness, in all the years of travels, parties, and experiences. Her hardiness and passion still exists in me, and is something I will try to pass on to my children – for now and whenever I am taken from them.

Cynthia van Ginkel lives and loves in Port Moody