She does not always know what year it is.
I have stopped correcting her on the year. The year is not the point anymore. The year is information she does not need for the life she is living, and correcting her on it was something I was doing for myself, to confirm that I could still reach her through the fog, and I have accepted that some corrections are more for the person doing the correcting than the person being corrected.
But she knows the grief.
She knows it the way the body knows things that the mind has lost the narrative for. She knows the grief of her sister’s death without knowing how many years ago it was. She knows the grief of a marriage that was hard in ways she could only name in her seventies after years of not having the language for it. She knows the grief of her own mother, who has been gone for forty years, the way you know an old wound, not as a fresh thing but as a presence, as a shape in the body that has become part of the body.
Memory, I am learning, is not chronological.
What she is losing is the filing system. The dates and the sequences and the names that go with the faces. What she is not losing, what I do not think she will lose until she loses everything, is the feeling underneath the filing. The love and the sorrow and the longing and the specific texture of her own history as it lives in her body. She cannot tell you when things happened. She can tell you that they mattered. She knows, precisely, that they mattered.
I sit with her and we talk about her sister and she does not know the year and she knows exactly how much she misses her and those two things exist at the same time and I am learning to sit in that, to not reach for the correction, to let the grief be the real thing even when the facts around it have gone soft.
She is teaching me, I think, even now, even here.
She is teaching me that what we carry in the body outlasts what we carry in the mind, that love is the last thing, that the grief that lives beside the love is also the last thing, and that none of it needs a year attached to it to be true.
