When you acquire dementia, you lose your memory. It's a trade off.

For the past half year, at least, Marjorie has been daily and dutifully reading her Book of Mormon. She uses three different books, with no book marks. I put a book mark in the family-sized one, and put the two smaller ones in the bookcase so that she can finally get out of 1st Nephi.

She always kneels to pray beside the bed before she gets in. She gets up from her knees, thinks of something that needs to be done before she retires, and then kneels again to pray. Saying so many prayers is not a bad thing. I've seen her pray as many as three times before finally getting into bed. Having a knee-jerk habit like that is something to be admired.

When she arises in the morning, every day is Sunday. Every day is Sunday but Sunday. Today is Mother's Day 2025. That obviously makes it Sunday. I presented her with her Mother's Day present. She read it again and again and again and again. I was thanked profusely. I then heard her getting dressed in the bedroom. Something told me to go check. Sure enough, she was dressed for a day in the garden. She was surprised to learn that it was Sunday. Every other day she's surprised that it's not. Her very favorite question, that gets asked a minimum of twelve times a day is, "What day is this?" She is ever prepared to get prepared to go to church. Her mother was the same way. It's a wonderful thing to know that the workings of their inner clocks are set by church. Sunday is the gauge by which all other activities are regulated.

Marjorie gets a puzzled expression on her face whenever I mention anything about a grandchild. In the past several months that same puzzled expression appears whenever I mention one of our children. I take her by the hand and lead her to the wall where the pictures of our posterity are displayed. I point to the individual, and she says, "Oh." Interestingly, she can rapidly rattle off the names of her 10 children, in their birth order, and do it much faster than I can.

She plays piano daily, but is not the virtuoso that she was. She still does very well, but is never asked to play in sacrament meeting anymore.

She is happy, and so am I. She is happy as long as she knows that I'm close at hand. I'm the only one left in her memory bank, and she depends upon me. I am her memory, and I love having the job. I love that she is still the fun person that she ever was. She's fun and funny.

As we went down the road not long ago, she recognized the man by the hay barn. "There's Timmy," she said.

"I'm surprised that you recognized him and could say his name."

"It was a slip of the tongue," she said. How true.

Marjorie has one big worry: "What are we going to feed all these people?"

"That's Ivy's job."

"Who's Ivy? She's lived with us 10 months!? You're kidding!"