It took me 23 hours from the moment I left my house, drove through traffic, and took two flights to return to an old home of mine, Rio de Janeiro.
On the second flight, two young women sat beside me, their voices filled with anticipation, mapping out tours, nights of music, guys, and possibility. I smiled quietly. I remembered that life. I remembered going out every night, the beach, the music alive in my veins.
Since I moved to New York, Rio had been a vacation for me too, until it wasn’t. Until life asked something deeper of me, and that was when my mother had an accident.
She was hit by a car while crossing the street on her way home, and that is how she began her fourth stage of life: unwillingly.
I recently heard Joe Dispenza speak about how harmful it can be for the brain to live inside the emotions of the past. So I will walk gently here. I will share only what is needed, like stepping stones across a river, so neither you nor I has to fall into the depths of it.
My mother worked all day on the day of her accident. She was 79 years old, although retired, she needed the money and a reason to get up. And that was also the last day she lived alone.
After surgeries, transitions, and rebellious resistances, she moved from one child’s home to another. She had always been adamant that she didn’t want to live with her children. And eventually, she got her wish.
Three years ago, we placed her in a nursing home, breaking a vow my siblings and I had made as teenagers, after volunteering at one through our church, when we were certain we would never let this be her story.
Dementia had already begun to whisper long before that. It lived in the dust, in the piles of newspapers, in broken items placed beside new ones she refused to use.
Some may say that is not dementia, as many people live that way. But if you had known my mother… If you had grown up with a woman who made me clean the apartment twice because I had hidden dust under rugs while my friends waited for me to go to the beach… If you had seen her make me rewash all the dishes because I had missed spots in some of them… You would have known.
The home I closed when she was in the hospital did not belong to the woman who raised me. The signs were there. But I did not know what I was looking at. I had no reference. No grandparents to prepare my heart for this slow goodbye.
All I knew was that it hurt. It broke something open inside me, and from that fracture, I birthed my first book.
Yesterday, I visited her. She knew I was her daughter… but thought I was my sister.
I told her my name. She whispered my nickname, as if reaching into a fading photograph, trying to recognize the face in front of her. She asked me for a pen and paper… so she could write my name down and remember me. I had cleaned my purse hours before, so I didn’t have any.
The last time I saw her was in November, only five months ago, on her 92nd birthday, and she didn’t recognize me at first either.
Dementia…
This past Easter, my daughter Isabel caught me counting in Portuguese and said,
“I need to speak Portuguese so I can understand you when you are old.” Will I return to my mother’s words?
After 38 years living in New York, eight years of college education later, I still count in Portuguese, and I don’t know why.
Maybe the heart keeps its own language. Maybe memory is not stored in the mind alone. When the mind begins to forget, the heart starts to lead us home.
Since my mother’s diagnosis, my siblings and I have exchanged tips to preserve the mind, protect the brain, and slow the forgetting.
But there are moments that no tip can hold.
During one visit, I brought my mother to my brother’s home for a long weekend. A house full of voices, laughter, and familiar faces. She looked at me across the table and said quietly, “Take care of me. I’m forgetting everything.” Over the weekend, she asked multiple times where she was, sometimes 5 minutes apart. But she had been forgetting for much longer.
Years before, I took her to her birthplace, Salvador, Bahia, a state in northern Brazil, to see her siblings she hadn’t visited in years. She was already forgetting then, but something beautiful happened. She remembered the beach.
She remembered Itapuã Beach, the place where her father took the five children on vacation on a truck driver’s wages for a few summers. She remembered the small pool between the rocks where children could swim safely, the small bungalow where the seven of them stayed, but isn’t that how memory works? It releases what is heavy… and protects what is sacred.
In recent visits, she has asked me to take her to her mother’s home. She shushed my brothers, insisting they stop talking and take her there before her mother gets upset.
You never wanted my grandmother mad, I remembered.
On the drive back to the nursing home, I asked her, “How do you know Grandma wants you home?” My grandmother had died about twenty years earlier.
She looked at me, certain… somewhere between this world and another, “She came in my dreams,” she answered.
And in that moment, I recognized it.
Because perhaps this is not only a story of losing memory. Perhaps it is also a story of returning.
Returning to the places that shaped us.
Returning to the voices that first called our name.
Returning to a love so deep it does not need remembering, because it never leaves.
In the end, we do not disappear. We simply find our way back home.
If this story touched your heart, please “LIKE,” “SHARE,” and leave a comment below to share your thoughts.
As I continue sharing more about this journey and my mission, I’m also opening the door to my new book, The Medicine of Fire, for those who feel called to explore it.
God bless you all!