Forget-me-not

If memory is not proof of love, what is?

I used to think memory was the proof of love.
If you remembered me, you loved me. If you forgot me, something had gone wrong.

This year, I realised how fragile that belief is.

As much as I am a lover and a giver, I am also avoidant - especially with the things that matter the most. So I made a pact with myself to show up. Not selectively. Not when it’s easy. Fully.

I stopped seeing my grandmother when dementia took hold of her and Parkinson’s followed.
I couldn’t stand the undoing. Not hers - mine. The way I became someone unrecognisable to the person who knew me first.

She is my childhood in a human body.

Strawberry picking on someone else’s property like it belonged to us.
Clay pots drying in the sun, our hands stained and important.
A garden that felt hidden, overgrown, a little lawless.
And every night at six, without fail, feeding the hedgehog as winter closed in - the light thinning, the air sharper, everything quieter.

She didn’t live like other people. She collected things that didn’t belong to her.
Cats, mostly. She would lure them into her garden, feed them until they stayed, until they forgot where they came from. When they died, she buried them. And later, carefully, she would unearth their bones.

She kept their skulls.

And every Christmas, one sat at the top of the tree. Not once, not as a joke - forever.
Her version of a star.

There is no one like her.
And I know that sounds like something everyone says, but in this case it’s just true.

Dementia has a hierarchy.

It keeps what it wants. It discards the rest.

She can tell you a story from eighty years ago with precision - the colour of a dress, the smell of a room, the exact way someone laughed.
But eight minutes ago dissolves instantly. It doesn’t land anywhere. It doesn’t stay.

I am someone she loses and finds and loses again, all within the same hour.

Each time I walk into her room, her eyes search my face like a puzzle she almost knows how to solve.
Recognition sits just beneath the surface. You can feel it - the almost of it.

And then it slips.

The first time, it felt like a rejection.
Like I had been erased.

Now I understand something harder.

Memory is not devotion. It’s just function.

Because even without it, something in her still recognises me.

Her body softens when I sit beside her.
She reaches for my hand before she asks who I am.
She lets me read to her, like my voice belongs somewhere inside her, even if she can’t place it.

There is a kind of knowing that lives deeper than memory.
Below names, below timelines, below proof.

I stopped trying to remind her who I am.

Instead, I try to become someone she can feel she has known forever, in the space of an afternoon. I sit with her. I read. I let my voice do the work.

And there is something no one really says about this -

Dementia is not only cruel.

It is also selective.

It has taken me from her, yes. But it has also taken things I don’t know how she survived carrying.
A war.
A divorce.
An earthquake.
The loss of her son.

There are entire griefs that no longer live in her body the way they used to.

I don’t know if that is mercy or theft.
I don’t know if forgetting pain is a kindness or another kind of loss.

But I know this -

She may not remember my name.
She may not remember the life we lived before this.

But she knows I am safe.
She knows I am hers.

And maybe that is what love becomes at the end of memory -
not something you can recall,
but something your body refuses to let go of.