Who is forgetting who?—her forgetting me, or me forgetting her to make space for who she is now? Forgetting is a necessity. Forgetting as survival. Forgetting to keep living. It’s just dementia. Just. And yet it devours everything. Devastation braided with liberation. This work—my refuge. My scream. My house of fragments. Memory. Silence. Shame. Love. Trauma. Longing. Pain. I gather the pieces, not to make a portrait, but to stay inside what is fragile, what keeps shifting, what refuses to resolve. This is not a portrait but a conversation. It is grief. It is fear, confusion, and relief tangled together. It is learning to live in the shifting light of who she was, who she is, and who I am beside her. And sometimes, it is me yelling into the void, just to hear something—anything—come back. 

My mum is not dead, she just has dementia.