Photo of my mother, sister, and grandmother.

        "This work is about memory, how it fades, how it lingers, and how it shapes the ones left behind. It begins with my grandmother and my mother, two women bound by war in different ways. My grandmother survived the Cambodian war in 1975, only to develop dementia years later. My mother took care of her while also raising her sister’s children who had lost their parents. Now, my mother is the one losing her memories, and my sister and I are the ones taking care of her. I often wonder if she feels the same way she did when she was looking after my grandmother, if she senses the weight of time shifting, just as I do now.

         I grew up surrounded by the quiet strength of these women; my grandmother, my mother, my sister. My sister and I helped care for my grandmother as children. Back then, we were told she had a mental illness, a phrase that hovered over our home without explanation. Only later did we understand that she had dementia, that it was not just an illness but a slow erasure, a quiet vanishing. My mother carried that weight, just as we are carrying it now.

          The space around us has absorbed these changes. My mother’s home, once filled with the rhythms of daily life, is now covered in dust. The garden has grown wild, vines pushing their way through windows, trees taking root in places once carefully tended. The reminders of her past are still there. The notes scribbled to help her remember, photographs yellowing in the quiet, but they are becoming relics of a life she is slowly forgetting. When she first became ill, she moved to a new house. The home I grew up in, the place where all of this history unfolded, is empty now, left behind just as the past is slipping from her mind.

        There is a stillness in this, a sense of time pausing but never stopping. The weight of memory loss is not just in forgetting, but in watching someone disappear in pieces, in realizing that one day, they may not remember who you are. It feels like a slow kind of mourning, one that stretches across years. I see this not only in my family but in the empty houses around our neighborhood, spaces abandoned after the elderly passed away, their children having moved on to different lives.

        This work is my way of holding onto these moments, of exploring what it means to care for someone who is slipping away. It is about grief, but also about love, about resilience, about the quiet ways we carry those we have lost within us. Even as memories fade, something remains an imprint, a presence, a connection that endures beyond forgetting."

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By 

Marisa Srijunpleang