The Woman Who Forgets My Name

Every morning, Kofi introduces himself to his mother.

“Good morning, Ma. It’s me, Kofi. Your son.”

Some mornings she smiles and says, “Of course it is. Why are you telling me my own son’s name? Have you eaten?” Those are good mornings. He holds onto them the way a man in a storm holds onto a rope.

Other mornings she looks at him with polite confusion, the way you look at a stranger on a bus who has said your name. “My son is at school,” she says. “He’s only nine. Who are you? Are you from the church? From the electricity company?”

On those mornings, Kofi says, “I’m a friend of the family, Ma. I’ve come to make your breakfast.” And she relaxes, and lets him.

It took him a long time to learn that. In the beginning, after the diagnosis, he corrected her. He showed her photographs. He explained, patiently and then not so patiently, that it was not 1987, that his father had been dead for twelve years, that he was forty-six and not nine, that she was in his house, not hers, and had been for two years. He thought that if he just said it clearly enough, often enough, the facts would stick. He thought that love was the same as being right.

Every time he corrected her, she grew frightened. Then angry. Then she would cry for a husband who had died twelve years ago as if she’d only just heard, and Kofi would have to watch his mother lose his father all over again, fresh, in his kitchen, because he had insisted on the truth.

A nurse at the memory clinic, a quiet woman named Abena, finally sat him down.

“You cannot bring her into your world anymore,” she said gently. “So you must go into hers. Wherever she is, that day, that hour — go there. Meet her there.”

“But that’s lying,” he said.

“Is it?” Abena asked. “Or is it visiting?”

So now he visits.

Some days his mother is a young teacher in a village school, and she worries about the children’s exam results, and Kofi tells her the results came back and every child passed, and she claps her hands with joy. Some days she is a bride, getting ready, and she asks him whether her dress looks nice, and he tells her it’s the most beautiful dress he’s ever seen, which is true — he has the photograph, black and white, on his bedroom wall. Some days she is waiting for her husband to come home from the market, standing at the window with her hands folded, and Kofi tells her the traffic is very bad today, he’ll be late, and she says that man, fondly, and goes to sit down.

Some days she is a mother of a nine-year-old boy, and she talks about her son to the kind stranger who makes her breakfast.

Those are the days Kofi finds hardest. And, strangely, the days he has come to treasure most.

“He’s a clever boy,” she tells him, buttering toast with great care. “Too clever. Always asking questions. Why is the sky blue, why do birds fly south, why does the moon follow the car. I don’t know the answers half the time. I make them up.”

Kofi laughs. He remembers. The moon follows the car, she once told him, because it wants to make sure you get home safely.

“He’s very stubborn,” she goes on. “Like his father. Last week he wanted to climb the mango tree in the yard and I said no, too high, and he climbed it anyway and got stuck, and I had to get the neighbour’s ladder.” She shakes her head. “I was so angry. But when he came down he gave me a mango he’d picked for me, and I couldn’t stay angry.”

Kofi remembers the mango tree. He remembers being stuck on the high branch, terrified, and his mother’s face at the bottom, furious and frightened at once. He remembers the mango, bruised from his pocket. He did not know, until this moment, that she had kept that memory too — that it had been precious to her as well, all these years, folded away somewhere this disease had not yet reached.

“He sounds like a good boy,” Kofi says, carefully.

“He is.” She looks at him, and for a moment her eyes are very clear. “I worry about him. When I’m old. Who will look after him? He’s so sensitive. He feels everything.” She reaches across the table and pats the hand of the kind stranger. “I hope someone will be kind to him.”

Kofi cannot answer. He looks down at the table. He swallows several times.

“Someone will, Ma,” he says finally. “I promise.”

The disease is taking her a little more every month. He knows this. The doctors have been honest. There will come a time when she doesn’t recognise him even as a kind stranger, when she doesn’t speak, when the visiting will be one-way. He has read the leaflets. He goes to a support group on Wednesday evenings, a circle of sons and daughters and husbands and wives who all speak the same tired, tender language of medication schedules and night wandering and small, unexpected joys. He has learned to accept help — a carer three mornings a week, his cousin on Saturdays — though accepting help was harder than he expected.

He grieves her already, a little at a time. Abena calls it the long goodbye. Some nights, after his mother is asleep, he sits in the kitchen and lets himself feel the full weight of it, and then he washes the cups and goes to bed.

But he has also learned that a person is more than their memory. His mother still hums the same hymn tunes when she folds laundry. She still adds too much pepper to everything. She still says that man about his father with the exact same mixture of exasperation and love. She still, without fail, insists that the kind stranger who makes her breakfast eat something himself.

This evening, as he helps her into bed, she looks up at him and frowns, as if trying to remember a word on the tip of her tongue.

“You have his eyes,” she says.

“Whose, Ma?”

“My son’s.” She smiles, and pats his cheek, and closes her eyes. “Tell him the moon will follow him home.”

Kofi turns off the light and stands in the doorway for a long time.

Then he goes to the window. The moon is up, round and white over the rooftops, following, as it always has, everyone safely home.