Mother’s Day arrives differently for everyone.
For some, it’s flowers, brunches, and warm phone calls. For others, it’s grief wrapped in memory. And sometimes, it’s both at once.
This year, I find myself thinking about my mother, not only who she was, but who she is now.
My mother is 92 years old and living with dementia. Once fiercely independent, sharp (sometimes witty), determined, and endlessly capable, she now moves between mostly confusion and brief flashes of clarity, as though surfacing from another world for only seconds at a time before slipping away again.
And yet, even now, she is still my mother.
Before the dementia, before the slow unraveling, she lived many lives in one lifetime. She was a nurse. A mother of six children, including two sets of twins, which still feels almost impossible to imagine. Long before that, she was a young “farmerette,” picking strawberries on Ontario farms during the war years, part of a generation of women who stepped into difficult roles without complaint and simply did what needed to be done.
That was who she was at her core: resilient. Strong. Practical. Determined.
She had a sharp sense of humor. Not loud or theatrical, but subtle and quick. The kind that caught you off guard. Even as life became harder for her physically, there remained a quiet dignity in how she carried herself.
Which is why dementia feels particularly cruel.
It’s difficult to explain the pain of watching someone disappear slowly while their body remains. Dementia doesn’t arrive all at once. It comes in fragments. First the forgotten words. Then the repeated stories. Then the confusion, the fear, the anger, the moments where they no longer recognize the people who love them most.
You begin grieving long before death arrives.
And perhaps that’s the hardest part. There has been such a long time to say goodbye.
Piece by piece, the mother I knew slipped further away into the trap of her own mind. Sometimes she resurfaces briefly, a sentence that suddenly makes sense, a familiar expression, a glimpse of her old personality and for a moment, you think maybe she’s still fully there. But the moment passes quickly.
There is a strange loneliness in that kind of grief. It’s not sudden. It stretches across years.
Still, when I think of my mother, I try not to let dementia have the final word.
I think of the young woman bent over strawberry fields under the Ontario sun. I think of the nurse caring for others. I think of the exhausted mother raising six children with determination and grit. I think of her quiet laughter. Her independence. Her strength.
And I remind myself that even though dementia may have really altered her mind, it cannot erase the life she lived or the love she gave.
This Mother’s Day, my ode to my mother is not about perfection. It’s about endurance. About memory. About the quiet heartbreak of loving someone through their fading.
And about holding onto who they were… even when they no longer can.
