My mom may remember my name today.

Or not.

I’ve come to terms with this as I enter her memory care home, walk down the bright hallway and round the corner into her room.

One of my mom’s neighbors is taking a lap down her hallway, walking toward me. I know for sure that he won’t remember my name.

“Hi, Bill, nice to see you,” I say as I walk closer. He replies with a curious, somewhat confused expression, “Nice to see . . . you?”

Last month, Bill told me that he takes 600 laps a day inside the building using his rollator. He said that he likes to keep moving.

Walking through my mom’s doorway, I don’t hear anything. Pure silence. We make eye contact and she recognizes me. I can see it in her eyes.

“Hi, Mom, how are you doing?”

The question lingers for a moment. She then breaks into her playful smile, which I’ve known my whole life. The smile I remember from countless soccer games and chorus performances.

I give her a hug and remove the cloth bag from my shoulder. “Mom, I brought another photo album for us to look through today,” I explain as she starts to look more comfortable and more herself.

A few short years ago, back in June of 2021, my mom was diagnosed with Lewy Body Dementia and Parkinson’s Disease. But I suspected something was up when I noticed that her right foot was always trembling, and she stumbled on words and phrases.

After the diagnosis, we worked together to sell her house and move her to an assisted living apartment. We carefully reviewed her financial and insurance accounts and added my name to her bank accounts.

Her disease held steady until it didn’t.

On September 30, 2024, I got the dreaded call that we couldn’t put it off any longer. She needed to move from assisted living to memory care.

Did it go smoothly? No, not really, but we got through it. She is adjusted now, our new normal taking shape.

Her speech is worse than ever, her words often jumbled or inaudible. She often knows the word she’s looking for, but can’t seem to locate it. She rarely knows what day it is and can’t operate her iPhone without help.

Despite this, I made a fortuitous discovery. Her words and memories return miraculously when we look at old photos together. As we start looking through albums, whether they are from 10, 20 or 40 years ago, she points to faces, clearly naming people she hasn’t seen in decades.

On this particular day, we’re looking at an album from 1983, reminiscing about a road trip we took to visit family in Upstate New York. Photos of my cousins, aunt and uncle gathered around my grandparents’ kitchen table transforms Mom back into the laughing, energetic young woman.

She remembers it all.

She points to her brother, my Uncle Rennie, remarking at how young and different he looked back then. Her words flow freely when talking about that summer. Photos of our 1972 Volkswagen Westfalia van bring us back to our long drive from North Carolina.

“I made those curtains on my sewing machine,” she remarks, her shaky finger pointing to the red floral pattern on the windows, which matched the faded exterior of her beloved van.

We laugh as we flip each page, surprised at how different life was in 1983. Our hairstyles were long and shaggy. No gray hair or reading glasses for either of us. No cane or walker for her.

Because at this moment, sitting on a small couch in her room on this cold, winter day, we are the 1983 versions of ourselves again — before a debilitating diagnosis had taken over.

She is once again a fearless single mom, and I am a wild, long-legged 8-year-old girl, both of us laughing back then and grinning widely now. I can almost feel the wind hitting my face as we drive southward home in the faded, familiar camper van.