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Derrick z. jackson

Alzheimer’s didn’t take family memories

When I told my sons last month that my mother died of Alzheimer’s at 79, my oldest son, Omar, said she sang like Kathleen Battle. Tano said he was flooded with memories of his first trip to Milwaukee to see his grandparents at age 7. He recalled grandmother taking him to a horticultural conservatory, the zoo, Lake Michigan, and my father’s tool shop.

“I don’t know exactly what it means why those memories are so strong over time,” Tano said. “She was just showing me a good time, but it was like she was maybe instilling selflessness into the next generation.”

I’ve written before about my mother, trumpeting the “big” things she did for me, such as getting me bused to better schools, driving me to my first newspaper assignments, and driving home her principles as a light-skinned woman who refused to pass for white. Even when Alzheimer’s robbed her of knowing my name, she reminded me of the humanity still within her soul. One time, when I told her I loved her, she hugged me and responded, “I love you more.”

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My boys unleashed a new flood of memories, the kind we take for granted yet are as much our sinew, bones, and blood as seismic events. Her incapacitated body of the final years made me forget what Omar remembered — her gospels in the basement while washing clothes and in the church choir to cleanse the spiritually unwashed.

Omar, now 28, told me my mom took him on the same shopping errands she took me on as a child. “Grandmother would take me to Kohl’s and always was good at buying me winter coats,” Omar wrote. “It’s funny, whenever I pass by the newly built Kohl’s store in Keene, New Hampshire, it reminds me of Grandmother.”

That reminded me of Mom and me romping through department stores, especially around Christmas, when we pored over the Sears catalogue to pick the toys we wanted Santa to bring. It was in the Sears parking lot in 1967 where Mom told me the truth about “Santa.” I trusted my mom so much that I made it to 12 before this intrusion of reality.

I trusted Mom because she trusted me. Between her 6 a.m. seamstress job and my dad’s factory double shifts, our family rarely ate together. But Mom and I had a silent bond in the kitchen; she entrusted me to turn the stove on and off when I was 8. She left pancakes warming in the oven for breakfast, and I heated her pepper-and-onion-saturated spaghetti on the stove for my thermos.

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By 10, she taught me to make bacon and reuse the grease for fried bologna sandwiches. She laughed in mock horror as I bizarrely mixed Chef Boyardee spaghetti with Campbell’s barbecue beans; she smiled approvingly when I made my first cakes in my sister’s Easy-Bake oven.

Her front garden was not elaborate, consisting mostly of hosta plants. But she was no less fierce than any environmentalist in protecting her parcel of nature. One day some knuckleheads stole her flowers, and she sprinted after them. The boys never returned, which I attributed to her flash of courage. Decades later, Omar said Grandma’s warm “Southern manner” belied a “New York-type attitude when one ticked her off.”

As I got older, she displayed a more private courage. My father demanded I become a money-making lawyer. Mom pleaded with him to let go and let me be. When I left Milwaukee for my first newspaper job out of college in Kansas City, Mom stood at the door crying and smiling at the same time. She was sad, but still let go.

Now I’m at that door of life familiar to many, crying and smiling. Mom is gone, but despite a fading mind, she still gave my sons tiny lessons of selflessness, fierceness, and a connection that comes to life every time Omar sees a Kohl’s. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s when Omar was 14 and Tano was 9. Yet she left them with memories so precious, they restored mine.

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Derrick Z. Jackson can be reached at jackson@globe.com.