I just talked to my mother, she says in her soft voice. I’m at a spiritual retreat in New Mexico, and its leader is speaking. She has dementia, she continues, and she talks about our mothers being our first witnesses…..for we are working on developing a witness self within, and I start crying. My mother has Alzheimer’s. Before it began, she was beautiful, engaging, friendly, smart. She is still beautiful, still friendly. But over the last five years, I have watched too much of her depart: the woman who loved to shop; the woman who could take apart a car motor; the woman who could kill a snake; the woman who loved chocolate; the woman who was vain; the woman who was always generous with money—the first woman I knew. My Mama. She was a reflection of me. She was my earliest frame of self, and now I watch that frame splinter into fragments very slowly.
When I am through weeping at what is, I think about the idea of being a witness in someone’s life, reflecting back. What do I reflect back to those in my life? I wonder.
What do you?
Karleen Koen — writing life 
Thank you for sharing these touching moments, ideas, musings, and images.
My mother is forgetting as well (started two years ago, she is 98 and we had to put her in a nursing home for she falls a lot and is very frail) . . . I never looked at it this way, that she was/is my witness . . . so then I would reflect back to my sons (I never had a girl, alas) . . . this is very deep, and will take much thinking about . . . again, thank you so very much for your “musings and insight”, I hope your family appreciates you for I know that “we” do . . .