Today was my larger family's "mock Passover" party.

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After years of forcing them to do Passover my way, with a seder table stretched across my house, with a Haggadah for each person, with - hopefully - songs and discussions, I gave up, realizing that it was only my small family that wanted a real seder. The rest of my family is happy with a get together on a Sunday near Passover, with some traditional foods, and no seder. I can attend as long as it doesn't conflict with the real holiday. My sense of loss about this ended a long time ago, about the time I finally stopped trying to turn them into me. 

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But tonight there was a new sense of loss. We drove my elderly mother and stepfather to the party and my daughter's best friend was in the car, a girl my mother has met time and time again over the years; one who's even been to her house.

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And my mother said, "Who is this girl? I've never seen her before in my life." Like someone - or something - had erased this girl from my mother's brain.

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My mother has Alzheimer's Disease, though sometimes, and this might seem really stupid, I think she doesn't. Sometimes she remembers appointments better than I do, or the most minute ingredients in recipes when I don't, or directions all over a city in which the streets weave around mountains.

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And then sometimes, like tonight, my denial comes to a crashing halt in the face of some irrefutable evidence of the disease. My mother has completely forgotten her first person. Last one in, first one out. An inconsequential person to her life, after all. Just my daughter's best friend. But still. Who's the next one? When will she forget my kids? After all, she just met them eleven and fifteen years ago. When will she forget me?

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Sometimes I can write about this, other times I can't. Sometimes I have to and sometimes, after I've written something and become convinced again that she's been misdiagnosed, I become embarassed by my own words, ashamed that I said she has Alzheimer's when she so clearly doesn't. And then sometimes, like tonight, it's like a door slamming. She does.

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Prior to tonight, my mother had completely forgotten how to cook in the last six months. Yet tonight she buoyantly entered my vehicle, a dish of latkes held in her hands like a trophy. And, since I've turned into a younger version of her, I quizzed her on the ingredients, concurring that she got them all right and telling her that I've spent the last two days cooking. Off of the recipes she gave me. 

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Thanks for reading JWorld Cafe, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

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Linda Pressman is the Blog Editor of Poetica Magazine and a freelance writer. Her book, Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie will be available this week on Amazon.com and other venues. Her work has appeared in the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix, in Brain Child Magazine, and has been anthologized in several works including Mizmor L'David, an anthology of work by children of Holocaust Survivors.  She blogs at Bar Mitzvahzilla and on Open Salon.