It was early evening when we drove out to the airport to get her. My father had been caring for her back in New York for several years by then. She had deteriorated from pleasantly addled, a stage my father refused to acknowledge because to him my mother had always been addled, to the can't-drive-a-car stage (she had gotten into a fender bender and had driven away, oblivious, before my father yanked her license) to the wet-the-bed, wander-the-neighborhood phase. He was doing the best he could for a guy who had so little patience with illness that he used to glare at me across the dinner table when I sneezed. He thought I got sick on purpose just to annoy him. But my father had, in fact, stepped up in a big way. He was in his early seventies then and not a bad-looking guy. He had a full head of hair. He played a respectable game of tennis. He had a great government pension. He was, in other words, a "catch." He could have stashed my mother somewhere and found himself a girlfriend?more likely, she would have found him--and had some fun. He didn't. He learned how to run the house, how to do the grocery shopping, how to cook and clean. He did it all himself--I hadn't come home once to help, and my brother had his own life in Florida--and he had settled in for the long haul.

I was astonished. I didn't think he loved her enough to do what he was doing. I didn't think he loved her at all. My parents had not enjoyed a happy marriage. I grew up pretending not to notice how ugly it got sometimes, not ugly like wife-battering ugly or throwing-the-crockery ugly or write-a-memoir-about-it ugly, but subtler and more sinister: hissing fights behind closed doors; withering looks across the dinner table, my father muttering under his breath, every night, about my mother's faults, just loud enough for everyone to hear; my mother wincing, retreating, creating distance, growing colder. I grew up secretly hoping they'd divorce, and I could go live with my mother who'd get a job as a clothes designer in Manhattan, and we'd stay up late every night watching Katharine Hepburn movies on channel 9 and eating brussels sprouts, which my father hated. I grew up plotting my escape. My father was the villain in this domestic drama, my mother the creative spirit squelched by an emotional bully. For years, for decades, for my whole life, he had been the bad guy. Now, all of a sudden, he was the good guy. It didn't come easy, but I had to admire him.

But after four years of caring for my mother, he was exhausted, and his own health was beginning to suffer. He needed a break.

Getting off the plane, she looked a little better than I expected--I hadn't seen her in almost ten years--her hair freshly colored and coiffed, her navy pantsuit AARP acceptable, her eyes clear and focused, a faded blue, like jeans that have been through too many washes. She was pleasant and well mannered, treating my husband and me like marginally interesting strangers. She didn't object to getting in the car with us. She asked no questions about where she was going or who we were. I, of course, did all the wrong things, quizzing her endlessly in the backseat: "You remember who I am, don't you, Mom? Lauren, remember me, Lauren, your daughter? And this is Tom, remember Tom? We're married. You came to our wedding, remember?" I don't know how many times I said the word remember to this woman who had a brain disease that robbed her of her memory.

When we got home, it was clear that she was tired. She had traveled across three time zones and was ready for bed. I was thankful because I had no idea what I was going to do with her otherwise. I showed her the guest room I had prepared. There was a thick featherbed on top of the mattress and a down comforter over it. It looked like a puffy cloud. My mother would have loved it. She had an artist's eye for beauty--she was, she had been, a talented amateur painter of still lifes--and she, like me, had a penchant for high-thread-count bed linen. But this woman didn't notice. I opened her suitcase and looked for a nightgown. All her nightgowns were flimsy, sleeveless polyester things, cold and slimy to the touch. I went upstairs and got one of my long-sleeved flannel gowns and put it on her bed. I wasn't sure what she could do, what I was supposed to do. I told her it was time for bed, that she should get herself ready, and I left her there. Ten minutes later she was still sitting on the bed dressed in her traveling clothes. I started to undress her--no big deal--until I came to the diaper. I had forgotten she was in diapers.

With two sons and a daughter, I had changed a lot of diapers. In fact, when my mother arrived in town that fall, my daughter was only a few months old, and I was a good two years away from the end of my diaper-changing days. But changing your child's diaper is entirely different from changing your mother's. The first is a minor chore; the second, a heartbreak. I cleaned her up, then dressed her in my nightgown, led her to bed, and tucked her in. She smelled sour, vinegary, this woman who never used to leave the house without dabbing Crepe de Chine behind her ears. "I won't be able to sleep," she told me. I pulled a chair next to the bed and sat down. I thought about holding her hand. Or rather, I thought about what a nice scene that would make, me holding her hand. I thought about how that's what a good, loving daughter would do. She was asleep in five minutes.

When I woke the next morning, I rushed downstairs to see how she was and panicked when I saw the bed was empty. She got out of the house, I thought. She's wandering somewhere. She's going to be run over by a car, and it will be my fault. My father will kill me. But my mother had not escaped. She was in the kitchen eating a piece of toast she had made for herself, miraculously locating bread, toaster, butter, knife, and plate in a house she'd never before visited. My mother's domain had been the kitchen, and not just in the prosaic sense of a suburban housewife of the '50s and '60s. My mother had been an enthusiastic and inventive cook, an early Julia Child acolyte, a woman who taught herself Chinese cooking and periodically took the Long Island Railroad into the city to buy exotic spices and sauces in Chinatown. This was decades before you could find such items on the "ethnic food" aisle at the A&P, decades before any suburban housewife even knew there were such items. Kitchen knowledge, it seemed, knowledge of anyone's kitchen, was hardwired.

A few hours later, I dropped off my mother at the care facility (not Maplewood, which was yet to be built), a clean, modern, trying-hard-not-to-be-institutional place with six vacant-eyed women sitting in the living room. I got out of there as fast as I could. When I got home I took the nightgown she had worn, the one I lent her, and put it in the trash. Just in case Alzheimer's was contagious.

Copyright ? 2007 by Lauren Kessler