The story goes that as a child my mother finished a book every day. I have tried to imagine her then, but the best I do is a blurry glimpse of a girl walking among a vast and towering library of the things she’s read, fingers dragging along the spines on the lower shelves.

Somehow, among all the many volumes, Slaughterhouse-Five persisted as her guidebook. In seventh grade, it became mine too. We took its signature phrase so it goes to be our own, invoking it at every tragedy major and minor. We went to it as others might the bible. It said there was no reason behind anything and we’d be better off not seeking any. We liked that.

In 1999, Mom is on the phone with her sister, and she has something to say but she stammers. Her sister hears in her voice that my mom has news so bad she can’t speak it. Then there is silence on the line, then the sound of my father pleading, screaming my mom’s name.

For the next year or so, Mom has seizures. Some are violent, some subtle: she can’t speak, or words on a page suddenly look like nonsense. The quiet ones are the worst. She is humiliated and tries to cover them by smiling. She is a creature from another planet and she mimics the expression we make when nothing is wrong, but it is mechanical and wholly unconvincing.

I come home for Christmas in 2000 and things are worse. She sits in a chair in front of me and can’t speak. She looks just to the left of my face and smiles her incomplete smile. A minute later we are on the floor and I am trying to get as much of my body under hers as I can so she doesn’t bang against the hardwood. I am trying to hug an earthquake or muscle a paint mixer still. I shove my fingers into her mouth. Later, the bite marks in my fingertips throb under my pillow.

In February, my father calls and tells me to come home. When I walk into the intensive care unit a line of staples traces from behind my mom’s ear and in a long sweep around the back of her head, ending at her temple. Her skin is yellow and bruised. She opens her eyes and looks at me and says what the fuck are you doing here? They have cut open my mother’s brain and removed the part that edits.

Mom has moved backward to a seven-year-old edition of herself. I wish I could fetch a previous mom forward from our past to see this: she is Billy Pilgrim, unstuck in time! At once old and young and headed in who knows which direction! I wish I could look at the timeline of her life as a landscape and see where it ends.

The pathways to many words in her brain are gone. She asks for a shark with which to cut bread. I get her a knife and wonder if there is a scrambled drawer for sharp things or dangerous things somewhere in her brain. She asks me to open the hole in the wall made of glass.

She has no short-term memory. Her son is home, but why? He is grown up but home sleeping on the floor next to her. They never change from their pajamas. Somehow they have whole pointless days together again. It is off but she accepts it in the helpless way you accept a dream.

We sit at the kitchen table between her many naps. She reaches up to brush back her hair, and her fingers graze the staples in her head. She has no idea what is stuck in her hair and makes to pull it out. I stop her. They are staples. You had a craniotomy. I have at once explained the dream around her and disappeared it. We all knew about the secret mess inside her head, she realizes. It was so bad we brought strangers to fix it. She cries, destroyed at the revelation.

A few hours later, the memory is gone. Again she brushes back her hair, tugs at the staples, listens to me explain them, is devastated. This goes on for days. Or one long day, or decades maybe. Then, she reaches to brush back her hair once more and her hand touches the metal and it seems as if she might try to remove it. I prepare to tell her the story now well practiced, and she looks down into the space between us as if accessing a long-ago memory. She smiles a real smile, real because it is sad. So it goes, she says.

From that moment, time, for the most part, moved forward. From time to time I would get an email, sent in the middle of the night, with a single word she had been unable to find on the phone hours before. Plantain! Pendulum! The P words came last, but they came.

And later, after the fear that she would go back to being young again went away, I went home for a visit. I watched TV on the floor of my parents’ room as they lay in bed, mom with a book and dad with an issue of Motor Trend. They were quiet but for the scrape of pages turning.

In an instant and for the last time, her book turned to a language she didn’t understand. My father felt something different in their silence and figured she hadn’t any choice in it. He put his hand on hers. We’re going to the hospital, he said. Your mom’s having a little event. Mom and I looked at each other, the nonsense book still in her hands. She made no play at imitating a smile. The words spun around the room. She couldn’t speak them, but I knew what they were.