Terry was quiet again, and then he said something that reorganized the whole decade for me.

“She got soft at the end,” he said.

“The dementia.

It took the meanness first — that’s a real thing, the doctor said, sometimes the hard parts go early.

And near the end she’d cry about you.

She’d say your name and cry and say she’d done something she couldn’t fix and she couldn’t remember what it was.” He looked at me.

“I think she spent her last two years grieving a thing she couldn’t even remember doing.