Sometimes Goodbye happens... over and over.

My Aunt Cecilia loved to read. She loved old movies and she loved above all else, her family.

My Aunt Cecilia had an iron gate for a mind. Impenetrable, full of thoughts that she sometimes shared through sharp wit and a laugh that grabbed at your attention no matter where you were in the room.

That was my Aunt Cecilia.

Then one day, my favorite Aunt of mine found the trap door in her iron gated mind and fell through it.

You see, when you are diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's at the age of 58, you cannot help the impending fall. I remember when she told us like it was yesterday, not 10 years ago.

I remember because afterward her daughter and my mom (her sister) began to talk about what to do next. Aunt Cecilia had begun showing signs of some sort of decline for the last 2 years. She could not be a teacher anymore, she forgot what the lessons were the moment she wrote them, she could not follow you in your car because she forgot the directions upon reading them, or that she was following you in the first place. She could not ring your lunch up in the school cafeteria because she forgot how to work the cash register...

I remember so much, so vividly during this time. But mostly I remember my Aunt Cecilia's face. Her face seemed to crumple like tissue paper, and her body hunched inward, as if to warm herself from an onslaught of a cold front.

The cold reality that she would not remember much longer.

And now... 10 years later, my Aunt Cecilia has forgotten she was ever sad in the first place. She rocks back and forth in a nursing home while I feed her, her lunch. She hums to no music and sucks on her teeth in a smacking rhythm in her wheelchair. She mumbles words and looks up brightly when she sees my mom, but when she sees me...

She sees right through me. I talk to her about my day. I read her stories and ask questions that I know I will never get an answer from.

I... I... I try to remember for her.

I try, because what are we but the experiences and memories of our past? I think it might be the only way to even envision a future, by knowing your past.

I have never formally said goodbye to my Aunt Cecilia, but little by little with each visit, I see that I have been saying goodbye, over and over. I will never not be grateful for my visits and time with her, even now as a shell of her former self.

But even still, with the memory of her old self winking at me in my dreams, I say goodbye and hope that if there is a next life, she will be wholly herself,

her whole life long.