Memory

My grandmother didn’t remember me at the end.
She looked at me and said
“Jo! Why aren’t you at school?”
Jo is my mom.
I was six years old
When she left

it was without a memory of me.
But I remember.
I remember sitting on her lap as she painfully
combed the knots from my bird nest-hair,
I remember visiting her musty apartment
Old stuffed animals and chipped china dolls
littering her dining room chairs.
I remember the doll she gave me the last time i saw her,
Raggedy Ann with her faded blue dress, her yarn hair fraying.
And I remember when my mother said she was afraid.
Afraid that at the end, she would not remember either.