Free Watch You Die by Katia Lief

Something
was
missing: her memory. More of it was gone every time I came to see her and lately I struggled against the sense that I had already lost her. I had to remind myself that I hadn’t, not quite. She was alive, right here next to me. I held her hand as she drifted off to sleep.
    I remembered as a child studying this hand, thinking it perfect with its squarish palm and strong fingers. Her blunt fingernails painted red had reminded me of rosebuds as a little girl and I would gather them together into a bouquet. Then I would spread them out and place my small hand in her larger hand, press our fingers together and say, “See? Our hands are exactly the same size.” She always agreed with me even though it was obviously untrue. I never questioned, until I got older, why she didn’t remarry. We loved each other so powerfully that I didn’t see why she would have a need to love anyone else. Later, a mother myself, I understood that this would be the fantasy of any child and asked her why she had never even dated after my father’s death. Her answer: “I never met a man good enough to replace him.” But she also never looked. I suspected that after my father’s suicide she didn’t want to do anything to diminish our bond. She recognized its importance to me and knew her abnegation allowed us to live for each other alone … until I grew up and left her.
    I left her
. Her hand in mine now felt weightless. Grey and veined, every bone revealed by fragile spotted skin. Seven years of college and work in Boston, then fifteen years living on the Vineyard. Twenty-two years I lived away from her with just occasional visits.
Well, now I’m back, Mom. We’re back together
. But was it too late? I wanted so badly for her to tell me what was happening inside her mind so I could understand her journey. And I wanted to share my own challenges, to tell her about Abe Starkman and the bones, about Joe Coffin and how he’d been bothering me, about Nat and his glorious performance yesterday. I wanted to tell her I’d met a new man I liked and that his name was Rich. Everything. But I knew from experience that sharing details from my life only confused her. We could talk about events that were long past but lately she had lost whole decades of shared memory. She could not grasp that I had ever married much less that my husband had died or that I was a widow or that I had a son who was thirteen or that I now worked at what had been her daily newspaper. I had tried to tell her that I was a staff reporter for the
Times
, knowing that ten years ago she would have been very proud of me, but it slip-slid through her consciousness so fast it was as if I hadn’t told her at all. Being with her, it was as if none of the past events that had shaped my life had ever happened. Sometimes it was liberating to pretend with her but I could never sustain the fantasy for long. I always crashed back to earth while she continued to float above it.
    I couldn’t tell how much of the past her failing memory had obliterated. For instance, did she remember the camps? She never mentioned them. I knew she remembered my father and their early marriage but she seemed to have forgotten his death. She had lost most of the last thirty years. It was a helpless, progressive form of memory loss much like a picture that fades from the top down.
    As she slipped away, I found myself wishing that the eraser would reach deeper and wipe out not just her latest memories but the worst ones. If this was happening – and it was, undeniably – then why deposit her back in her childhood? It would be a cruel trick if her disease landed her in her earliest years when she was orphaned in one of the darkest nightmares humanity had ever suffered. Sitting beside her now, holding her frail hand, I prayed she would die before that happened. But if she didn’t, if her illness forced her to return to that abysmal time, I would be right here with her, holding her hand, a connection to