My sister and niece just came back from Arizona after a visit with our parents. I had been meaning to fly out there myself but kept the trip on the back burner, letting work or the kids or slim finances take precedence. So I was glad that she had gone and asked her how the visit went. Not that I figured my mother’s dementia would have miraculously begun to reverse. Time marches on, to borrow a phrase, in its inexorable fashion. It was rather that, as far distant as I am from the day-to-day caring for either Mom or Dad, I see them as they were, not as they are and certainly not as they’re steadily becoming.

I include my father in this because although he doesn’t have a disease, per se, he is old and becoming more fragile, both in body and in mind. He is no longer the strong but quiet provider I knew in my growing up years, the man who taught me to change a tire, drive a nail straight and true, demolish a wall and rebuild it. He is tired and does little more now than read or watch television, his world shrunken to accommodate his frailty and the burden of his years.

As I talked to my sister, she mentioned my niece saying she couldn’t imagine not being able to talk to her mother. It’s one of the most hideous manifestations of this disease, the inability to communicate with the person lost inside it. The lightbulb went off then. It’s the reason I haven’t gotten on that plane before this, the reason for all the excuses I’ve made over the past year to stay away from the southwest. It makes me cringe to own up to it, but I didn’t want to come back remembering my parents the way they are now. I wanted to remember what was and not what is.

And yet, my sister said, Mom is still there in a small way. In the independence that keeps her trying to get out of the wheelchair and walk. In the way she hums or sings to herself, like she always used to. In the brief flashes of recognition that lit her eyes when she heard my sister’s name and saw my niece’s face. In the trusting way she falls asleep every day on my father’s shoulder. She is still inside this nightmare somewhere.

So I will pay my bills this month and forego a few dinners out each paycheck until I can scrape together the plane fare, and I will go. Because despite what time has molded them into, these two people are still my parents, the core that I’ve built my world around all my life. As they used to be and as they are now. I’ll go and build some new memories, even if they aren’t as wonderful as the old ones. And I’ll keep the memories of all the times, bad or best, for the two people I love the most.