Goodbye, Mom — But You’re Not Dead

The first time Mom forgot my name, I laughed.

It wasn’t the hollow laugh I give now, but a real one. I thought she was joking, teasing me, like when she’d pretend she didn’t know where I’d hidden the cookies, even though we both knew she always found them.

“Who are you again?” she asked, squinting like she was trying to place me in a memory she had misplaced.

“I’m your favorite daughter,” I said, grinning.

She didn’t smile back.

That night, I went home and cried into the crook of my arm like a child. Like the child she raised. Like the child she was beginning to forget.

They call it "the long goodbye.”

I hate that phrase. It sounds poetic, almost beautiful. But there is nothing poetic about watching someone dissolve right in front of you, slowly, quietly, cruelly.

Every week I’d visit. At first, we’d play cards — Go Fish or Crazy Eights. She’d still beat me sometimes. She still had that twinkle in her eye. But then she started forgetting the rules. Then the suits. Then the point of the game. Eventually, she’d just move the cards around, like a child playing with puzzle pieces that no longer fit.

The twinkle left, and so did the card games.

I started bringing photo albums instead, narrating our lives for her like an audiobook on repeat.

“See this one?” I’d say. “That’s the time we went to the lake. You made peanut butter sandwiches and forgot the jelly. We laughed about it the whole drive home.”

She’d look at the photo like it was someone else's life, and maybe it was. The version of her who remembered that day was gone. The new version just blinked, polite and vacant.

Sometimes she’d smile. Other times, she’d cry and not know why.

And sometimes, she’d just stare through me like I was glass.

One afternoon, I walked in to find her humming.

She hadn’t spoken in days, but now she was humming a lullaby. My lullaby. The one she used to sing when I was small and afraid of the dark.

I dropped to my knees beside her wheelchair, tears bursting forth before I could even blink them back.

“You remember?” I whispered.

She kept humming, eyes closed, rocking gently. I wanted to believe she was reaching out from somewhere deep, some fading corner of her mind where I still lived.

But I couldn’t be sure. That’s the worst part. The uncertainty. Every flicker of recognition feels like hope — and every blink after that feels like loss.

So I’m writing this letter.

A goodbye to a woman who isn’t dead, but isn’t here either.

A goodbye I never got to say out loud because you never truly left — you just slowly… disappeared.

Dear Mom,

You used to tuck me in with a kiss on the forehead and the smell of cinnamon on your shirt. You used to braid my hair even when your fingers ached. You used to sing to me when I was scared.

Now I sing to you.

You used to remember everything. Birthdays. Allergies. That I hated celery but loved strawberries. Now you look at me like I’m a stranger holding your hand.

But I still hold it.

You once told me that love isn’t in grand gestures. It’s in the quiet things. A packed lunch. A warm scarf. A hand on the back during a hard day. You loved me like that, quietly, constantly.

So I’ll love you the same way. I’ll sit with you even when you don’t know who I am. I’ll tell you stories even if you can’t follow the plot. I’ll be your memory, even if you’ve lost mine.

Because love remembers when memory doesn’t.

Goodbye, Mom. Not because you’re gone —

But because I have to let go of the “you” I knew,

To keep loving the “you” who’s still here.

Forever your daughter,

Even if you forget that too.

That evening, I read the letter aloud beside her.

She stared out the window the whole time, nodding once at the end — as if she understood, or wanted to.

And maybe… that was enough.

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