The Hymn My Mother Still Knew

“Are you the one who does the hair?”

My mother asked me that over a plate of chicken and noodles, with her napkin tucked into the collar of her lavender cardigan and her fork held the wrong way around.

“No, Mom,” I said. “I’m Anne.”

She looked at me kindly, the way you look at a stranger who has been nice to you in a waiting room.

“That’s a pretty name,” she said.

It was the second time she had asked since I sat down. It was a Tuesday, a little before noon, in the dining room of the memory care wing in Decorah, and I had forty minutes left on my lunch hour.

I turned her fork around for her. She let me.

That was how it had been for three years. She was not unhappy. I want to say that early, because people hear “memory care” and picture something worse than what I saw on Tuesdays. She was warm and fed and clean, and the aides were good to her. She just did not know who I was.

She knew I was somebody. Some days I was the one who did the hair. Some days I was a girl from church. Once, for a whole visit, I was her sister Helen, who has been gone since 1998, and I did not correct her, because she was so glad to see Helen.

The dining room was bright that day. It has six round tables and big windows that look out on a bird feeder and the back parking lot, and against the far wall there is an old spinet piano with a doily and a fake fern on top of it. Nobody played it. One of the keys in the middle stayed down when you pushed it.

There was a new aide on the floor. I had noticed her the week before, because she was young and because she talked to the residents while she worked instead of over them. Her name tag said Marcy. She had a brown ponytail and blue scrubs, and she was going table to table with a plastic water pitcher.

She was at the next table over, filling Walt’s glass. Walt is a retired farmer who wears his seed cap to every meal and takes it off for nothing.

And she was humming.

It was not loud. It was the way a woman hums at a sink, not for anybody, hardly knowing she is doing it.

I knew it in four notes.

It was “Children of the Heavenly Father.” If you grew up Lutheran in northeast Iowa you know it too. It is an old Swedish hymn, and it does not march the way most hymns do. It rocks. It goes along in three like a cradle, or like somebody swaying with a baby on her shoulder in the back of the church.

It was the hymn from my wedding.

My mother’s fork stopped halfway to her mouth.

She set it down on the edge of her plate. She set it down neatly, tines up, the way she had set things down my whole childhood. Then she put her left hand flat on the tablecloth.

And she stood up.

I thought she needed the restroom. That is the plain truth. In that building, when someone stands up in the middle of a meal, that is nearly always what it means.

“Mom?” I said. “Do you need to go down the hall?”

She did not look at me. She was looking at the wall above the piano, at nothing, with her chin lifted a little.