“No, you’re pretty,” my mother said, pointing at her friend who had just given her the same compliment. They both wore bright colors—fuchsia, red, and cantaloupe. She ran her fingers down the arm of her own sweater, feeling its softness and the raised woven designs. When she pointed at her friend’s shoes and nodded her head, her friend understood that she admired them, and the ladies smiled at each other sweetly.

“She likes the same things I do,” she looked at me and said, grinning widely.

It was a comfort to her to have a companion who shared her tastes. In fact, they had everything in common.

Since my mother’s Alzheimer’s disease and rapidly spreading breast cancer had progressed, her twin in the bathroom mirror had become a part of our family and they kept each other company throughout the day.

Mother’s memory had developed holes in it. She forgot common words like fork and chair, she couldn’t remember what foods were safe to eat, couldn’t bathe herself, forgot family members’ names, and didn’t even recognize their faces sometimes. Often, she didn’t know what city or whose house she was in, even though she had lived in the same place for over fifty years. I was a stranger to her, and she was sometimes even a stranger to herself, forgetting her own name and where she was from, but she never forgot her friend.

She would stand in front of her and smile, and when she would touch her own face or shift back and forth, her companion would do the same and they both giggled like schoolgirls at the same time, totally ignoring me when I would walk past, as if they were the only two people left alive. They would perform a quiet pantomime and would mouth words to each other silently, as if communicating in secret.

The memory of how to dress herself had faded away but the two of them still played dress-up. Instead of putting a decorative headband over the top of her head, she pulled it down across her forehead so that it sat just above her eyebrows. When she pulled on her sweater, she got it upside down so that the hood was draped down around her hips instead of her head. They giggled together at the funny sight, and Mother thought it was even funnier that everything she did, her twin did backwards.

Stroking her own hair, soft and white, she said, “Your hair looks just like my mama’s.” With a look
of nostalgia in her eye, she reached out to touch her friend’s hair but her fingers only found a hard piece of glass.

Mother’s companion became whatever she needed, yet the age of the person in the reflection always seemed to be in flux. Sometimes the friend was a mother figure, meant to be watchful over her. Sometimes she was a playmate, meant to entertain the part of her mind that had returned to childhood, and sometimes she was an old woman in need of help—an imagined entity on which she could project her caregiver instinct. In my mother’s younger years, she had been a mother of three—two boys and a girl—and had cared for a disabled granddaughter and an old dog named Teddy. But now she was being mothered by her own daughter, treated like a child, having her underwear changed and her toenails clipped.

“Take a bite,” she would say, as she touched the Little Debbie oatmeal cream pies up to the silvery glass, coaxing as if she were feeding a stray kitten.

When she worried about her friend being cold, she tried to drape a blanket around her shoulders.

“Here’s you a good warm glove,” she said, forgetting the word for blanket.

“Do you need some socks on your kidneys?” she asked, as she took off her own socks to give to her. When she showed her companion kindness and generosity, she received kindness and generosity, not from her daughter, who had become a stranger, but from her trusted ally who was always familiar to her.

Her oncologist had predicted that she would live no longer than six more months but Mother never seemed to want to talk about it with our family, and I wasn’t sure if she even understood her prognosis until I saw her touch the tumor on her breast and heard her mutter to her reflection, “This will be what takes me away from here.”

Each day, over and over, she wandered to the bathroom as if possessed by a spirit, returning to the mirror, seeking something that only the mirror seemed to provide. At times, she would peer into it with an eerie glaze across her face, rocking back and forth like she was on watch, looking into a world that only she could see. Expressions of pain, anger, weariness, and despair swept across her face, one after the other, and sometimes she would hold the large, purple tumor that was growing on the side of her left breast, as if to show her companion where she hurt.

Her friend served as a reflection of her innermost feelings, the ones that were buried deep inside her, casting back thoughts and emotions that she didn’t know how to articulate anymore. Perhaps the image reflected depression, loneliness, and the feeling of being lost and stranded, or perhaps confusion, chaos, and fear of the unknown. The more the Alzheimer’s progressed and the more the cancer weakened her previously healthy body, the more unknown everything became, except her confidant in the mirror who was there to comfort her and acknowledge her existence and her feelings in a way that our family could not, no matter how hard we tried.

At times, she stood for hours gazing into the mirror, her legs trembling from fatigue, as if she was on vigil, waiting to catch a glimpse of hope, something she could reach for and grab and pull out of herself, some solution that would set her world right again and make her free.

“I know that little woman gets tired of staying in that wall,” she said with a strained expression. But despite her efforts to get her friend to leave the wall, the woman refused.

Late in the day, when the shadows would fall, the world looked different to Mother due to a condition known as sundowning, which causes some Alzheimer’s patients to get confused, agitated, and disoriented by the changes in light patterns.

As the sun would slowly set, she would start to worry about her friend. Sometimes on the way to check on her, she would get lost trying to find the bathroom and she would wander all over the house. But despite her fear, she would never leave her loved one alone in the dark.

Then at last, when the pair reunited, Mother would stand on shaky knees, pleading with her reflection to leave the wall and go with her to find safety. “Come on! Come on! We’ve got to go. It’s getting dark.”

She knew her friend was scared because she could see the distress and fear in her eyes. “The sun is setting! Come with me,” she said, desperately urging her to leave the wall.

“We have to go or we’re going to die. We’ll die!”

The more Mother pleaded with her companion to leave the wall, the more I pleaded with Mother to leave the mirror but she clung to it with fierce desperation, as if she would disappear if she let go and would fall into a place so dark she would never find the way out.

Holding on to the edges of the mirror with a grip so tight her fingernails started to hurt, she would cry, “I can’t leave my friend!” Then she would fall to the floor, crouching and trembling. With tears rolling down her cheeks, I would pry her fingers off the mirror. As I would help her up and lead her out of the bathroom, she would turn around to see her friend crying and she would promise that she would visit her tomorrow. And tomorrow they would both be wearing the same clothes, wave at each other at the same time, and giggle like schoolgirls as they clapped their hands, and they would both feel better.

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