The Days with Her

I had never imagined moving back to my childhood home. I left it at eighteen with the fierce conviction that I never would. And yet, at forty-six, I found myself unpacking boxes in the same small town near Würzburg, where the bus still comes every hour and the bakery closes on Wednesdays.

The house hadn’t changed much. The wallpaper in the hallway was still slightly peeled at the corners, and the faded cross above the kitchen door still tilted a little to the left. What had changed—what had broken, really—was my mother.

At first, it was small things. A forgotten kettle on the stove. Calling me by my father’s name—he’d been dead nearly ten years. But things spiraled quickly. By the time I returned for good, she was already deep inside the fog of her own mind. Her world had narrowed to about three rooms, a few memories, and a long string of yesterdays.

The doctors had a name for it. Mixed dementia. Vascular damage and Alzheimer’s working together like conspirators. “She’ll have good days,” one said. “But fewer, and further between.”

That first morning, I found her sitting on the edge of the bed, staring out the window. The sunrise cast a soft gold on her thinning hair.

“Good morning, Mama,” I said.

She turned slowly, brows furrowing. “Who are you?”

I didn’t flinch anymore. “I’m Felix,” I said gently, kneeling so we were eye level. “Your son.”

She blinked. “Ah,” she said. Then, after a pause: “You look tired.”

I laughed, surprised. “So do you.”

We fell into a rhythm, her and I. Mornings were the best. I would make her black tea just the way she liked it, with a bit of lemon and two sugars. Most days she wouldn’t remember my name, but she’d remember the taste. “My mother used to make tea like this,” she’d say. “We’d drink it under the apple tree. Summer tea, we called it.”

There was no apple tree in our backyard. I don’t know if there ever was.

One day, while folding laundry, she told me I had a sister. “She was the clever one,” she said. “The one with the books. You were always outside, throwing sticks.”

I have no sister.

But I didn’t correct her.

Sometimes, I’d find her in the hallway, staring at the wall.

“What are you looking for?” I asked.

“The door,” she whispered. “There was a door here, wasn’t there? To the garden?”

There never was. But I nodded anyway. “Yes,” I said. “It’s just around the corner.”

She smiled. “Ah. Thank you, dear.”

I became familiar with a kind of grief that doesn’t arrive all at once, but stretches itself over weeks and months like fog rolling in across the hills. Every day I lost a little more of her. Not dramatically. Not suddenly. But like books being taken off a shelf one by one, until all that’s left is dust and silence.

And yet.

There were moments.

Once, in mid-March, the sky grey and swollen with late snow, I found her in the kitchen, humming to herself. It was an old song, one she used to sing while cooking on Sundays. I watched from the doorway as she opened the cupboard, pulled out flour, eggs, milk—then looked at me and said, clear as a bell:

“Felix, would you get the hand mixer? The boys will want pancakes.”

I stood frozen. She hadn’t called me by my name in three weeks.

I got the mixer. We made pancakes.

She talked about my father as if he were still alive. She asked if I’d seen Mrs. Keller lately—our old neighbor who’d died in 1997. She asked why the radio never played proper music anymore. But she called me Felix. And for one morning, I wasn’t a stranger. I was her son.

Afterward, she grew tired. I helped her into bed, pulling the blanket over her small frame. She smiled up at me and said, “It’s nice, you know. Having you here.”

“I’m glad to be here, Mama.”

She blinked slowly. Her eyes, for a moment, were entirely lucid.

“You always were a good boy.”

That was the last sentence she ever said to me clearly.

She’s still here. Physically. We go for short walks, when the weather allows. I read to her in the evenings. Sometimes she watches me with a curious expression, like she’s trying to place me.

“Are you the nurse?” she asked last week.

“No,” I said. “I’m just your son.”

She laughed. “Well, at least you’re kind.”

Kindness. That’s what’s left when memory is gone. No history, no shared jokes, no old photographs that mean anything anymore—just the tone of your voice. The way you touch her hand. The warmth in your eyes.

That’s what she recognizes.

And it’s enough.