The sand was warm

In her later stages of dementia, she has forgotten much of her recent life but has long held tight to brief vignettes of long memory.

This afternoon, she told me about trudging up the sand-covered hills along the Lake Michigan shoreline, losing her footing and rolling backward down the slope again.

There were bits of gravel and dried brushes of prairie grass, sea shells yet to be eroded by time into grains of blonde beach cover. I know those were there. I’ve been to those dunes.

But she remembered not the harshness of those elements.

“The warmth of the sand feels nice on skin cooled by those winds down on the waterfront,” she said quietly.

But I could see behind her closed eyes how she was panning across the movie screen of that memory.

“Dad yelled at me thinking I was hurt. I wasn’t. He dropped his paperback on the sand and raced toward me. But I laughed."

Lifting her head up from her recliner, she swiped her right palm slowly across the back of her neck as if she were feeling something.

“The sand was warm,” she repeated. “But the nice kind of warm, you know? Like the kind of warm you get when someone nice leans in against you, when someone holds your hand just because.”

I think she forgot I was there, sitting next to her, listening. She was narrating to herself now.

“The sand was warm.”

She fell asleep.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez tells us of the sweetness of such memories.

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”

She might have gone through much in her ninety-something years of existence. But all of it was cast aside in this moment: all the anger, all the sadness, all the hardships and the easygoing parts that I’ve written about her in the medical record.

In this moment she remembered a fall, remembered a laugh, remembered that the sand is warm. And in this moment, that’s all that matters.