This is a story about forgetting. Forgetting how old you are. Forgetting where you live. Forgetting all your nieces and nephews and all your brothers-in-law, and the names – and when you are tired, or your routine is disrupted, sometimes the very existence – of your grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Forgetting dear friends, people you’ve known and loved for more than 70 years. Forgetting, though not entirely, “Die Fledermaus,” an operetta you saw probably a dozen times and that your late husband liked to sing around the house in a booming voice. Forgetting how to set a table properly, fork on the left, spoon on the right, knife blade toward the plate, though in your time you set a mean table and were widely known as a hostess. Forgetting, each and every morning and evening without fail, which is your toothbrush. It’s the white one.

This is a story about my mother, who is 94 and spent a week here in July.

It’s a story about forgetting where the bathroom is, where the bedroom is, where the front door is, this in your daughter’s home, a place real estate agents would generously describe as “cozy.” Forgetting how to write a postcard, though for years you faithfully wrote your own children cheery postcards in neat cursive from your travels in France, England, Nova Scotia, Tuscany, all over the place.

Forgetting that you packed a suitcase for your annual summer visit to Maine, packing two sets of pajamas and two toothbrushes and far too many shirts because you forgot you already packed those items. Forgetting that you are going to Maine, though you have been told 100 times, 200 times, 300 times, most recently just one minute ago. Forgetting that you are now in Maine.

The morning after my mother arrived, she thought we were leaving. Five days after she arrived, she thought she had just that minute walked in the door. On the way up from New York, she offered to help with the driving. She is blind in one eye, and the other doesn’t work so great either. Also, she hasn’t driven in seven years.

My mom stayed at my house, in my bed, while my partner and I took over the guest room. If you’d asked her, though, she’d have told you we were renting the house for the summer. Everyone else on my street, an ordinary residential street in Portland, was a summer resident, too, as far as she was concerned. And she was pleased that the landlord of our place had done such a nice job with the furniture, some of which, by the way, used to be hers.

When I tell her – many times – that I own the house (well, me and the bank), she is astonished anew. “But you are such a young homeowner!” Umm, Mom, I’m 62. Which makes no sense whatsoever because she is sure she is about that age herself. “So there are only a few years between us?” she asks, puzzled.

I guess the fact that she thinks we are only here for the summer explains why she can’t understand where everybody is. She is confused that there are only three for dinner – her, me and my partner, Joe. For 30 years, there were routinely a dozen people at the table at our summer home; friends and family were always welcome to drop in. So where are they? Once, she asks why Bob isn’t having breakfast with us. Bob, my father, has been dead for four years. It is the first time she has done this.

When she can’t remember something, her mind seems to make a leap. Joe compares it to AI, which “hallucinates.” Most of the time my mom has been in Maine over her lifetime, she has been on vacation. Ergo, she must be in a vacation home. Most of the time she has been in a vacation home, her whole family has been there right alongside her. Ergo, the house should be full of siblings and children and cousins. When we write a postcard to her grandson at summer camp, she tells him she has been swimming in the ocean every day. We have not been swimming in the ocean, or anywhere else, even once. But we are in Maine. The beaches are near. It is hot out. Her mind fills in the blanks with unimpeachable logic.

Mom doesn’t remember that we saw the movie “Barbie” to escape the intense afternoon heat. Movie plots have been impossible to follow for several years now. She doesn’t remember a thing about “Barbie,” though as the credits rolled, she turned to me and rendered her verdict: “goofy” and “over the top.”

She doesn’t remember we sat at Bug Light Park for several hours, taking in the cyclists, the dogs, the kite flyers, the sailboats, the yellow and white ferries going back and forth to Peaks Island. It was a wonderful afternoon. She doesn’t remember having dinner with my friend Charmaine or lavender lemonade with my friend Wendy or my neighbor Chelsea coming over to visit with her new baby boy and her little girl.

She doesn’t remember going to Deering Oaks to watch small children splash in the wading pond. She doesn’t remember going to Jordan’s Farm Stand in Cape Elizabeth on another very hot day, where the kind lady running the store sat my mom down on a bench, gave her glasses of cold water to drink, talked to her about birds and handed her two free tomatoes.

She doesn’t remember that my beloved cat Trixie died barely three weeks ago. Where is Trixie, she wants to know. Or sometimes where is Elsie, which is the name of my sister Carolyn’s very-much-still-living-and-breathing-and-barking dog. At least it gets a little less painful each time I must tell her that Trixie has died, and that, no, I am not yet ready to replace her because it’s only been one day, three days, one week …

Night and day confuse her, too, despite the dark and the light, which you’d think would be clues.

Happily, Mom doesn’t remember that I lost my temper, more than once, from exhaustion, from not getting a single second to myself – a single second – without her immediate, insatiable needs breaking in. Maybe from heartbreak, too.

She missed entirely the several moments when I disrupted Joe’s very busy, very stressful workday – he hates to be interrupted – to tell him through gritted teeth that I was about to cry uncontrollably and to please do something! Anything! Please! Help me!

My regard for full-time family caregivers has shot up one million percent since her visit. They deserve hot fudge sundaes and luxe vacations and million-dollar-winning lottery tickets every single day of the week.

Mom does remember how to fold laundry. She remembers how to make a perfect bed, and she does so unfailingly every morning. My bedroom has never looked so tidy. She remembers how to shuck corn and to ask for coffee and orange juice when she gets up. One morning, I discovered the milk had soured, and I dashed to the convenience store two blocks away to get a fresh carton. Back in a jiffy, Mom. A jiffy wasn’t fast enough. By the time I’d returned home, my sophisticated mom had eaten a dry bowl of cereal.

Though she doesn’t remember that I live in Maine, Mom does remember childhood vacations in Old Orchard Beach. And she remembers that when her family got the news Canada had entered the war – “the war” for her means World War II – a long line of cars with Canadian plates headed from the beach all the way to her hometown of Montreal.

Mom remembers to put on lipstick, even if no one is there to see her but me. Inexplicably, she remembers Jody, the daughter of an old family friend who grew up and moved to Portland 40 years ago. And she remembers, perfectly, the social niceties. When company comes, she lights up. Her party conversation is impeccable, her sense of humor quick and intact: Where do you live? What do you do? How did you meet Peggy? (Over and over and over.)

One evening, I’d invited two friends over to meet her. They couldn’t come until 6 p.m. when their workdays were done, but I had not invited them to dinner. I could barely pull off meals for three people each day while taking care of my mom.

Mom did not drop the matter of dinner. She has obsessions these days: the number of white cars on the highway, how she is getting from one place to another (a plane? a bus? a train?), her pocketbook – where is it? Why is her wallet empty? Every three seconds that afternoon, and I wish I were kidding, she reminded me it was rude to ask my friends over at 6 p.m. and not invite them to dinner.

I invited them to dinner. We had a lovely time.

Sometimes Mom remembers that her brain is not working right, and that makes her unhappy. Other times, she thinks her memory is just fine, thank you very much, and while it drives me crazy when she insists she remembers some fact perfectly that she has 100% wrong, I am still glad.

She has been sleeping a lot at her home in New York. She sleeps after breakfast. Not infrequently, she sleeps in the afternoon, too. She goes to bed very early. We children have thought her body was shutting down. But out of the facility where she lives, out and about in the world, seeing young people and middle-aged people and friendly dogs, not just the old and dying, eating tasty home-cooked food, busy from morning to night with activities designed just for her, she suddenly stays up late, and her naps are brief. She’s the Energizer Bunny, my sister Carolyn says with despair in her voice. We can’t keep up.

Now I get it. The sleeping is depression.

It’s not bad where she lives. It’s good where she lives, a swanky facility as these places go, with interesting residents who’ve led interesting lives. She chose it herself when she was more herself. She has many overnight visitors – children and grandchildren – and daily visits from my sister Leslie, who lives just minutes away. But the very moment we say goodbye, poof, those visits vanish. Though it’s not true, Mom thinks she is often alone.

She left Maine for Vermont, for a visit with Carolyn. I am 100% sure that, long before they ever crossed the state line, Mom had no idea she was ever here.

Just before she left, we were talking and for reasons I can’t remember (Is it happening to me? Can you hear my panic?), I’d referred to myself in the third person. “Who’s Peggy?” Mom asked me. She’s erased me, I thought. Just like that. Her own daughter. I’d been wondering when that particular shoe would drop. Thunk.

A minute later, though, I caught my mistake. I’m here; it’s my mom who is being erased.

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