My mother always recognises me, though she does not always know how I fit in. She often asks where ‘our mother’ is. Instead of giving her a straight answer, I engage her with questions.

‘How old are you?’

‘How old do you think your mother might be?’

‘When did you last see her?’

She often needs assistance to answer these, and to see the missing logic in her question. It is really just an academic exercise. A few minutes later, she is up for another round of questions just like the last.

Every time I see her, she asks where she is to sleep that night. Every time I ask what she ate for lunch, she cannot remember. She has no sense of the last half year in this place peopled with caring souls who look after her with affection, dignity and respect. But I can tell by the way she smiles when she sees them that she is not troubled, and that she lives her days in a peaceful state.

It is a deeply sad experience, when the person who was once the most important figure in your life, cannot remember so much of what passed between you, what you do now, or who you turned out to be as an adult. What I hold of my mother is in the past. It is at least eight or nine years since the person she once was quietly left the room for good.

What is left is the spirit of her childlike self. They say personality change is a feature of dementia, and so I see not so much the personality traits of the adult, but what my mother might have been like in childhood. She is still intensely curious, fully focused on family, loves conversation though she cannot follow its thread, and is polite to a fault. The only similarity to her adult self is her preoccupation with beauty and with fashion. Without fail, she will notice a nice pair of shoes, sparkly earrings or a plush leather bag within a minute of a person’s arrival. Once, when I remarked that she was still fond of beautiful things, she said, like I was out of my mind, ‘What else is there?’

But some things stick like pine sap to little fingers. My mother can rattle off long poems, or the lyrics to old songs. She can quote the birth year of most people in our family – even those not on her side of the tree – and she will recall in vivid detail the objects in her home, her sisters’ beaus, and the anxious war years of her teens. When I put her headphone on her head and she listens to songs from her youth, she smiles with recognition. But it is up to me or the nursing staff to remind her about the music, for if we didn’t she would never ask for it. She cannot work the iPod, no matter how many times I show her it’s just two things that have to be remembered: On/Off, and Play.

So in a strange way, I have become my mother’s memory, though only of one section of her life. The other section, the one she lived before I came into the world, I can only relay in second hand waves of my own memories that – originating from my childhood – are now probably less reliable than her long-term recollections.