Hello. First let me correct a mistake I made in my last post. I met my mother and stepfather in Toronto in 2008, not the early 1990s. What was I thinking? That’s just about 20 years off the mark!

But now for: “I’m not myself.” My mother said that to me yesterday, and it summed up much of what we’ve been going through this past while. She recognizes that she is not herself from time to time. It’s like a spell which she comes out of. And she recognizes it as such. From the dream-like state in which she went wandering, or when slips away for a while and suddenly asks me “What day is it?” (I can now point to our daily info board.) I’m-not-myself is a state in which she seems to drift away for a while, though it is most noticeable when she wakes up in the morning and whatever dream she may be having continues until we can talk long enough to bring her back to some simple facts: where we live, the time, the day and date. It a bit of a revelation for me. It helps me understand her, and what she is dealing with. Not being herself is a state she wants to avoid.

“What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?” – E. M. Forster