This is the first Mother’s Day of my life when my mother has no idea who I am.

A year ago, visiting my mother, it seemed fairly clear that she knew me. And my brother.

We might have been wrong. But we chose to believe that it was true.

My brother and I believed this even though, over the last few years, my mother had rapidly descended into dementia, Alzheimer’s, something. The exact diagnosis has yet to be made clear.

But what is now entirely clear is that my mother no longer knows who I am.

Usually, on the fairly rare occasions I write for The Daily Memphian, I write about Memphis. The state of local journalism, a summary of an interview I’ve done, some observation about the city, or, of course, a not-so-subtle-plea for subscriptions or donations.

That’s how it should be. (Even as annoying – and necessary – as those solicitations may be.)

And so I’ve been thinking: What does my mother’s illness even have to do with Memphis? I mean, my mother doesn’t even live in Memphis.

Then, on Saturday, I was reading Geoff’s lovely article about letters from his mom. Which I couldn’t finish. Because, as I read it, I suddenly thought about how, this Mother’s Day, I won’t even go through the motions of calling my mother.

Not that I could reach her. She’s confined to a facility in the Pacific Northwest, one locked down more than ever because of the coronavirus pandemic.

And that made me think that there are so many people here in my adopted home, Memphis, who won’t – because they can’t – even talk to their mother on this day. And they certainly won’t see their mothers in person.

I guess I wanted to write this to say that, on this beautiful, sad day meant to commemorate mothers, you are not alone.

The descent into dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s – any of the consciousness-robbing diseases that steal the people we love – is a maddening and confusing and tragic horror. Be it a mother or father or spouse or any loved one.

And it’s a horror inevitably marked by months or years of going through the motions of normalcy.

You’ve ignored the forgetting of the names of your children. You’ve nodded your way through the bafflingly confused responses to a casual comment. You’ve marveled at how memories of recent events – then all events – were so easily, and strangely, and then sadly lost.

And yet even at its worst, when we’re with these people who are so rapidly disappearing before us, we realize that in person, face to face, some of what is worst about this descent is eased. Forgiven. Forgotten.

But coronavirus means that even those painful, confusing, but ultimately necessary moments of in-person contact aren’t possible.

Which is as it should be. Senior living facilities have been decimated by this outbreak.

But the pain of forced separation from a person who can’t even recognize that separation is somehow worse on the people who do still feel it.

Because this pandemic redoubles the distancing wrought by dementia. An emotional quarantine made that much more formal and severe.

The last time I saw my mother we were walking out to the car so she could be taken back to the facility where she lived. She’d just sat quietly through a dinner with my brother and me.

Not once during that dinner did she show any sign that she knew us, her two sons. Who she loved more than anything.

And as much as my brother and I didn’t want to believe this at the time, the truth is that dinner was when I realized what had been obvious for some time: Our mother didn’t know who we were. In any way at all.

And yet, after dinner, walking to the car, my mother absently reached out and held my hand. The rational part of me knows that this had nothing to do with me, her son. It was just habit. Or maybe an instinctive need to steady herself as she walked near me down that hall.

But, for a minute, my mother held my hand. And for that minute, I could believe that she did remember me.

It’s a moment that those of us going through the loss of a living loved one know we want. And need. 

But it’s another casualty of this pandemic. Because now, even on a holiday like Mother’s Day, those moments of amazing, sad and ultimately false hope aren’t even possible.

You are not alone.