June 16, 2026
Today Mom had a visit from one of her best friends. Donna came to see her, a friendship that stretches all the way back to 1976. They are both in their eighties now, carrying decades of memories between them, though only one of them can still reach most of those memories.
Donna is a magical musician. She has spent her life at the piano and organ, and today she seemed to speak through music more easily than words. She never tested Mom with questions. She never asked, “Do you remember me?” Instead, she honored the friendship for what it has always been. She remembered enough for both of them. She sat and played tune after tune, like a dueling pianist carrying on a conversation across time. The music filled the room with echoes of years that dementia cannot completely erase. For a while, friendship itself seemed to be the memory. Donna stayed longer than she planned. Every time she tried to leave, she couldn’t quite say goodbye. Maybe some part of her knew that each visit carries a little more uncertainty than the last. Finally, she asked me to walk her to the car. She promised she would come back soon.
A few minutes later, the visit was gone.
Mom sat looking at the photograph we had taken together, needing the picture as evidence that someone special had been there. The music had faded. The conversation had disappeared. The friend who had spent a morning pouring decades of love into the room had already slipped beyond her reach. Yet the feeling lingered. Watching Donna struggle to leave, watching Mom hold onto a photograph of a visit she could no longer remember, I thought about how dementia turns every farewell into a long goodbye. A person is here, and then not here. A memory arrives, and then drifts away. Love remains, even when the details do not.
Today feels almost unreal, as if it happened somewhere between memory and dream. Donna’s music, her kindness, her reluctance to leave, Mom studying the photograph afterward—it feels suspended in that fragile space where you want to hold onto something that is already slipping away.
