Virginia’s Voyagers

I’ve written about my mother many times.

She was an enigma, the entire time I knew her. She was cool, gathered, quiet and definite. She was tailored and streamlined, her blouse always pressed and her seams straight. She was careful and spare. Her entire presence was like a cool cloth on a fevered brow. I will never know anyone as gentle as my mother.

When she died, she had Alzheimer’s. She had stopped cooking, golfing and talking. She stacked cans of beans and hash and then decorated the towers with Christmas bows. She kissed my father’s hands the night before she died but she had forgotten everything else about her life.

So fifteen years after she died, I am walking in the local Alzheimer’s Walk. I have no idea what took me so long to do this simple thing – of showing up, claiming her and her Alzheimer’s Disease, doing…