My sister didn’t believe the sincerity of my pain when I fell in a heap to the floor after Thanksgiving dinner.

“He’s just trying to get out of doing dishes.”

Not true.

I crumpled under the massive weight of the food intake, and any immediate attempt to stand up might set off an eruption, plus I felt dizzy with prospects of blacking out.

My parents let me groan in the hallway without any lecture on gluttony or starving children in other countries. Perhaps they felt bad for not noticing the 8- or 9-year-old miscreant shoveling down a third helping of mashed potatoes or scooping up backhoe proportions of the canned cream corn or sliding multiple slices of canned cranberries into his face as the adults indulged in conversation. Maybe Mom took my collapse as a compliment. Growing up, except for her homemade, pressure cooker bean soup that needed a galloon of milk per spoonful to swallow, I gave her four stars on a Four Star scale for her skills as our home chef.

Last month, I swung down to see my brother in Winston-Salem, North Carolina for a whirlwind visit. We enjoyed a weekend basketball tournament and marching band competition with my niece and nephew as well as their annual Pumpkin Carving Party, a smashing success. In a kitchen conversation, my brother mentioned Mom’s green bean cuisine, a culinary work of art that we grew up with as a dinner staple. No one made green beans better than our mom. My brother, a distinguished English professor, prepared her savory masterpiece for a group of sophisticated friends, and after they commended him on such fine dining, his guests were duly surprised, and perhaps disappointed, to hear the ingredients.

The secret recipe: open a can of green beans, drain the water, empty into a pan, and melt Velveeta Cheese over the top.

Serve.

Like the “peasant dish” in the Disney movie Ratatouille, my mom transformed the common into the extraordinary. I still prefer skim milk over whole milk because I grew up drinking Carnation Powdered Milk, poured out of the box and mixed in water. The “butter” I loaded on toast wasn’t butter at all, but Imperial margarine, the less expensive substitute. The Thanksgiving slices of “cranberries” that I could eat forever turned out not to be actual cranberries, but a congealed jelly sauce. Yet, except for Mom’s nasty bean soup and maybe her concrete meatloaf, I ate like a king as a kid.

Today, Mom and I continue traveling on a thirteen-year journey with her dementia. She kept in good shape throughout her life and remains fit as she spends her days ambling around the hallway at her residency. We take a walk almost every visit, and like in my childhood, I go where she leads…with a new caveat—“Mom, let’s not get into trouble”—when she wants to enter another resident’s room or rifle through a nurse’s station.

I usually visit during the dinner hour, and a year or so ago, she held up a fork and asked, “What do I do with this?” I demonstrated for her, and the memory kicked in, and she ate appropriately with her fork and spoon. Lately though, she has started using fingers more than silverware, and her procedural memory does not revive when I show her how to hold the utensils. Last Thursday, for the first time, I started feeding her. We continue to cross new benchmarks of unlearning.

After dinnertime, we used to sit together and watch movie musical scenes on YouTube starting with Singing in the Rain, and then whisk around the musical archives wherever our whims took us. The iconic dance numbers held both our attention, and we could belt out the lyrics to “Good Morning” as effortlessly as Debbie Reynolds dancing down the staircase in high heels.      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu4v5hB1dKk

Lately, Mom’s cognitive regression has diminished her interest in such memory lane escapades, and she will get up at random and walk away as casually as Gene Kelly strolling down the city streets on roller skates. Now I visit with a book in hand for personal reading and can leave without any concern of her verbal protests at my departure because I wait until she wanders off. I no longer hold the invisible, familial tether to keep her close.

As of today, Thanksgiving, I have visited Mom forty-eight times this year and will have met my New Year’s Resolution to see her at least once a week. Mom has not known who I am for a long time. She doesn’t remember the names of her children or her calling upstairs in the morning, “time to bite the cheese,” which meant to come down for breakfast, hot oatmeal with brown sugar or pancakes with bananas or something good. She doesn’t remember the extra plate of Thanksgiving dinner the staff gave her tonight. Mom doesn’t remember any of my visits. She enjoys me only as a momentary, friendly face and hand to hold, and in her temporal condition, the consistency of my presence no longer matters to her.

It matters to me.

I suppose in a small way, this Thanksgiving, it is my way of saying, “Thanks, Mom.”