We paid a visit to an elderly relative, Vania, whose Parkinsons’ included the onset of dementia. She had recently been moved to a long term care facility.

It was very, very cold. Only on my visits to Illinois am I reminded of just how cold winter can be. Shreds of snow from a fall the week before still whitened the grass in places.

The institute is a massive, blocky highrise just off the highway, in one of those bits of city that dot the countryside around Chicago. I was impressed with the place, which was quite clean, had only a faint scent of antiseptic. The people who worked there, most of them either Russian or Polish or black, seemed gentle, friendly, and patient with their charges. Vania had been moved to the fifth floor — the Alzheimer’s ward, which may have been a mistake. Most of the patients on the 3rd floor where she’d been were comatose, but she knew the personnel there, the upheaval had upset her, and some in the family felt she was not getting the supervision she needed.

The fifth floor was as cheery as such a place could be, I suppose. Elderly women sat in wheelchairs or trundled past with walkers or inside strange, wheeled trollies similar to strollers. One woman who looked disturbingly young — in her fifties, upright and vigorous with iron-gray hair — wandered silently, her face troubled as if she had walked into a room and forgotten why.

Vania was not in her clean, bare little room (the only decoration, pictures of her family lined up on a shelf.) and the staff went in search of her. They found her asleep in another patient’s room and brought her back to us. Tiny, birdlike Vania, whom I remember as perfectly groomed, with permed auburn hair was in a sort of sweat-suit, and her hair was a fly-away mess, the gray growing back. She moved in tiny, uncertain steps and though she recognized us, she seemed bewildered by all the people around her as she was guided to a chair.

She was like a woman who saw us from a distance through a fog and was trying vainly to reach us. Her voice rose and fell softly, constantly, in a stream of words that sometimes made sense, sometimes did not. We kept asking her questions, raising our voices as if she were deaf, which only confused her. She could not sit in one place, would get up and try to leave, and we would have to talk her into sitting. Her eyes kept closing as if she were dozing off, but she would not lie down. She begged us to take her shoes off because they were so heavy, and I did so as she sat on the bed, then realized her feet were too swollen for me to get the shoes back on.

Only a couple of times did she make sense. Once, she looked over at Michael and made us all laugh by adding, at the tail of something else, “…and really, Michael, there should be something we could do about that, some way we could get some hair up there…”

Another time, in the midst of what she must have felt was chaos, she caught my eye and said, “I never wanted to be like this, you know. I wanted my children to have good memories of me.”