It’s raining. Not too hard—just drizzling enough for the use of the windshield wipers on Mom’s Camry. We pull up to the vaguely familiar place that is always called her assisted living facility. But I know better. It was just a nursing home.

It’s been months since our last visit.

“I don’t even remember the code,” Mom says behind her clinched teeth.

Luckily, a nurse on staff buzzes us in. She looks tired. Circles shadow her heavy dark eyes.

We wander to Room 1213 in silence.

The empty bedroom could only mean one thing. Dinner time.

But where was the cafeteria again?

The stench of the cold hallways stings my nose.

After a few wrong turns, we find our way into the dining area.

“There she is.” My brother, Dylan, points to a table in the front left corner.

There she is, alright.

My grandmother, not even 80-years-old, sits with her hands folded one on top of the other silently in her wheel chair. She mumbles something to the lady with the braided pigtails sitting to her right.

“Hey Grandma!” I walk towards her. Very big, uncomfortable smile plastered across my face.

For a second she just stares at me. Expressionless. Emotionless. We make eye contact, but it sends an unwanted chill down my spine.

She sees me, yes. But does she really see me?

We started noticing the first signs about eight or nine years ago. Forgetting to feed her cats. Forgetting which day she scheduled her hair appointment. Forgetting she was the president of her own company!

Her life had collapsed. World Trade Center collapsed. You don’t just recover from destruction like that.

After months of constant arguments, Mom finally got her to go to a specialist. The news the doctor gave us was exactly the news we all feared.

“Dementia,” he called it.

My grandma had Alzheimer’s.

At first it wasn’t that bad. But when she couldn’t live on her own anymore, we had no choice but to move her to a home.

She was extremely confused when she first got there. We just ignored her questions.

Over the next five years, her memory declined rapidly.

Two nursing homes later, and I can barely still say that she’s my grandma. This lady, she’s not the same. This lady’s just some stranger that has taken her body hostage.

My brother and I don’t like to go visit.

Although we have our different reasons, we both really are some kind of selfish.

A couple months ago Dylan and Mom got in an argument over going to see her. She got so frustrated that she couldn’t convince her son to go see his only living grandmother for even an hour.

After she gave up and went alone, Dylan and I sat together in the living room watching TV.

“I feel really bad,” he said to me, still staring at the rerun of Family Guy. I could actually see the remorse glistening in his big, brown eyes. “Its just that I don’t even really think of her as my grandmother.”

I didn’t know what to say to him. So I said nothing. Just listened.

“I try to think about all the times before she had this disease but… nothing. I don’t even think she knows we’re her grandkids.”

I guess I understood where he was coming from. But I wasn’t in the same position as him. I remember before the disease. I remember well.

That’s why its so hard for me to be around this “new her”. I don’t want it to be the way things are at the end. I mean, who wants to remember their once lively and outspoken grandma as someone who barely remembers their name? It breaks my heart.

Mom made us come that day.

We feared it had been too long. Feared she wouldn’t even recognize us. Feared we’d lost her forever.

Each one of use pulls up a chair to join her while she eats. The ground up meat and applesauce on her plate suddenly brings a queasy feeling to my stomach. I try not to look at it.

Mom reaches over and grabs my grandmother’s veiny, wrinkled hand. She points in my direction.

“Do you know who this is, Mom?” Ironically enough, she speaks to her almost as if she were a child. She grins at her mother and waits for an answer.

I wonder how much pain hides behind that grin. All of the sudden, something wonderful happens.

She smiles.

Even with her newly missing front tooth, it is the most beautiful smile I’ve ever seen.

“Yes,” she says—still smiling, “that’s Melanie.”