In the last three years of my mother's life, she often did not know my name.
She knew my face. She would reach for my hand when I sat beside her. But the word "daughter" had slipped away, along with so much else.
At first I grieved this as a kind of death. I would leave her care home and sit in my car and cry for the woman who had taught me to read, who had come to every school play, who had remembered every birthday without a calendar.
But something shifted in me when I stopped trying to be remembered and simply tried to be present.
I brought music she loved. I showed up every Tuesday regardless of what she remembered from the previous visit. I held her hand. I watched the garden with her.
She died not knowing my name. But she died holding my hand.
What I carry from that time: presence is its own form of love, entirely independent of memory. Showing up matters, even when — perhaps especially when — it is not recorded anywhere.