It’s the ghosts in her voice, not the vivacity of her steps, that propel me to study my mother from my half-opened door. But even if my door were open to the universe my mother still wouldn’t see me. The strength of her eyes is locked onto nothingness. For right now she’s on her ghost walk through the house, and I’m the invisible entity on the outskirts of her dark and her disease. 

Millions of souls too many suffer it: Alzheimer’s. Yet my mother’s struggles with forgetting and the collapse of herself from herself feels devastatingly solitary. 

From my bedroom door I try seeking comfort in my mother’s comforts. She’s wearing one of her favorite nightgowns—purple lily—the cotton of the fabric caressing her skin as she like it. She looks warm as a ray of the sun. The outline of her nightgown is loose but shapes the shape of her elder breasts, exposes the sticks of her thighs, the dry bareness of her feet. 

At seventy-six my mother looks like a dead little girl, a doll—pale as porcelain and just as easy to shatter. Seeing this, my attempts at self-comfort shatter too. For the blue of her eyes, vacant and otherworldly, perfect the doll of my mother’s appearance. And the rattles of her moans designate her as a ghost, like the little ghost girl in every ghost telling. 

My mother is a ghost-doll. She scares me to death. 

Diseases of the mind can cause scares like no other. I want to ask my mother to stop walking and to sit down with me to watch a movie. If horror must live here let it be through a movie. Let us watch a B-rated horror for the scares. I want to see if she’ll turn to me and grin, saying, “that was incredibly fake,” like she used to when we watched all things scary and she was never afraid.

I love my mother for always. Her fragility pokes at my protection. Her fragility makes me want to break her apart and put her back together again. Off with her head, on with a new one. Like a Barbie missing its head, I want to gift her a replacement without the disease in the brain.

I also want to put my mother in the China cabinet in the living room, together with all the porcelain dolls she once kept dusted and safe behind glass walls.

But I won’t put my mother in the cabinet, as I already jail the memory of her, jailing her when she says she needs to find her way back home—when she says she’s not where she’s supposed to be, and I stop her at the door before the alarm can. 

What is it about homes that confuse the brain so much? One form of Alzheimer’s will not carbon copy another. But there always seems to be a search for what is forever lost and a loss of what is still here and waiting. Maybe that’s where the wanderlust comes in for them, the fight to retrieve in the past what is continuously stolen from them.

My mother’s steps are unrelenting tonight. I want to tell her to stop everything, but maybe, just maybe—

Maybe the shuffles of her feet mean she’s at the beach in the seventies with others like her, sand nestled between her toes. Maybe she’s found the fifties, where she’s walking hand to heart with my father on a date, the man she will later propose to without fear.

Maybe my mother’s at a diner in the fifties, drinking a vanilla float with her school friends, giggling and speaking old slang through a straw. 

Maybe, just maybe—

But my mother suddenly moans a ghastly breath on her wander, and I’m pushed off balance and afraid again. For in her nightgown and with her ghost voice, my mother is the terrifying old woman from every tale from everywhere. During the day she is confused. At night she’s confused and ghostly. At night she becomes a warning and a fear: she becomes a woman who haunts. 

I wait for her moans to become whispers of, this is not my house, and, I want to go home. Yet no words escape my mother tonight. Only moans and coughs, the ghosts in her throat.

Thunder rumbles inside me. And I anger at myself for stringing together the words “ghost” “haunt” and “doll” when describing my ailing mother. Even when I see their manifestations winning in her body. 

Tonight my mother continues to walk in circles. She is little. Her skin is ghost-pale. I’m scared of her. I’m scared for her. She keeps walking. I see it. I love my mother with an agony.

I don’t care for villain stories. And I don’t see monsters in older women. I remind myself as I watch my mother’s trajectory that women can’t haunt—not spaces or memories. To exist is not to haunt, even in an existence I can’t always reach. 

My mother is living in her life. She knows where she wants to be. Yet tonight I wait for her to stop her feet and to look—at the family photos on the wall, at the ceramic houses on the fireplace, at the painted chickens on the kitchen shelves she’s kept for years.

Tonight I wait for my mother to see the dolls in the cabinet behind the glass. To dust them. To hold them.

To stop walking.

To see. And to keep seeing.