When Memory Fades What Still Remains
I sit beside my mother and watch her drift in and out of sleep. Some days she knows who I am. Some days she does not. I am her daughter, and I am also a hypnotherapist, and those two roles now live so close together that it is impossible not to make connections.
When her memory began to change, I assumed connection would be the first thing to go. Names, stories, the shared timeline that tells us who we are to one another. And yes, much of that has faded. But what surprised me was what stayed.
She still feels tone. She still responds to gentleness. She still knows when a room feels safe. When I sit quietly with her, when I stop trying to orient or explain, something soft settles. Not recognition, exactly, but something real.
It made me wonder whether memory is doing something more than we usually admit. What if memory is not consciousness. What if memory is what creates time.
Memory is how moments get stitched together. It creates before and after, then and now. When memory weakens, that stitching loosens. The present becomes thinner, harder to hold. This is why someone with dementia may live in what looks like the past, or repeat the same question again and again. It is not resistance. It is not denial. The timeline itself is fraying.
And yet awareness remains.
As the story of her life becomes quieter, something deeper feels intact. Emotional awareness. Sensitivity to touch and voice. The ability to feel comfort or distress without needing to explain why. My mother may not remember my name, but she knows when she is safe. She knows when someone is kind. She knows when she is not alone.
This has changed how I think about the subconscious. We often talk about it as if it is buried somewhere below us, something primitive or less developed. Sitting with my mother has shown me something different. When the narrative mind fades, what remains is not smaller. It is foundational.
Older than language. Less concerned with time. More attuned to presence.
This is the same layer many people touch in deep relaxation, meditation, or hypnotherapy, when the thinking mind quiets and time softens. Dementia arrives there without choice. Therapeutic work visits gently and returns. The paths are different, but the place feels familiar.
This is why correcting someone with dementia so often creates distress, while meeting them emotionally can bring calm even when facts are wrong. The deeper mind does not care about accuracy. It cares about coherence. Safety is real even if the story is not. Love is real even when names are gone.
Caregivers learn this without being taught. Over time, we stop correcting. We start listening beneath words. We respond to feeling instead of facts. In many ways, we become the present moment for someone whose sense of time is dissolving.
As a daughter, I grieve what has been lost. As a practitioner, I recognize the place she now inhabits. It does not feel like emptiness. It feels closer to the beginning than the end.
And in learning how to sit with someone whose sense of time is dissolving, we are gently taught how to be with what remains, and how presence has always been enough.
