Credit Illustration by Wesley Allsbrook
I was a twelve-year-old home-schooler, hungry for friends, when my grandmother bought a one-way ticket to stay with us in Texas.
“So!” Nana said, as she clapped her hands after a round of hugs at baggage claim. “Let’s go home!”
“What about your bags?” I asked.
Nana pulled a worried, contemplative face.
“I forgot to bring anything,” she concluded, just before her familiar plaid suitcases scraped down the carrousel behind her.

 The summer before, a neurologist had diagnosed Nana with probable Alzheimer’s disease, but with a family history like hers—both of her parents’ lives had faded out in a fog of dementia—that “probable” seemed unnecessary. My grandmother’s forgetfulness that autumn was alarming. Often she would panic at the wrinkled stranger in the mirror and ask us how old she was. “No!” she would reply, aghast, when we told her. She sometimes forgot that my mother was her daughter, and she inquired why I called her Nana. “It’s just what I call people I love,” I told her, and she gave me a long hug, a wet kiss on the forehead. There was a new effusiveness to her affection.

 I didn’t know the lingo then, but my grandmother was already deep into a process scientists call retrogenesis, a cognitive return to birth. Shameful to admit: in my naïve and selfish twelve-year-old eyes, this could sometimes feel like a positive development. Nana cackled gleefully at my juvenile jokes, spent hours watching me play video games, and joined me in Kriss Kross dance parties and sing-alongs to the “Lion King” soundtrack. I was neurologically developing as she was neurologically regressing, and that winter we were at a moment of equipoise.
More