Genius Foods

was as though she were wearing a space suit underwater—
each stride and gesture looked like a purposeful, conscious
decision. Though I know better now, back then I couldn’t
even make the connection between the way she moved and
her brain’s health.
She also began offhandedly complaining of mental
“fogginess.” This too was lost on me. No one in my family
had ever had memory problems. In fact, my maternal
grandmother lived to ninety-six and her memory was sharp
until the end. But in my mom’s case, it seemed as if her
overall processing speed had slowed, like a Web browser
with too many open tabs. We started to notice that when we
would ask her to pass the salt at dinner, it would take her a
few extra beats to register. While I chalked what I was
seeing up to “normal aging,” deep down I had the chilling
suspicion that something wasn’t right.
It wasn’t until the summer of 2011 during a family trip to
Miami that those suspicions were confirmed. My mom and
dad had been divorced since I was eighteen, and this was
one of the few times since then that my brothers and I were
together with my parents under the same roof—seeking
respite from the summer heat in my dad’s apartment. One
morning, my mother was standing at the breakfast bar. With
the whole family present, she hesitated, and then announced
that she had been having memory problems and had
recently sought the help of a neurologist.
In an incredulous but playful tone, my father asked her,
“Is that so? Well then, what year is it?”
She stared at us blankly for a moment, and then another.
My brothers and I chuckled and chimed in, breaking the