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­My mother slices onions, the knife meeting the cutting board with staccato beats. She dices tomatoes, too, and I picture their juice spreading into pink puddles. From the living room, I sneak glances at her to make sure the blade in her hand doesn’t cut into her tender skin.

I remember a different mother – a well-coiffed mother who sprayed her hair with Aqua Net, a mother who wore knee-length skirts and lipstick, even the occasional trendy wig during the hair-obsessed ’70s. Not this stranger whose standard uniform is white pants and a t-shirt stamped with lettering from some run my brother did who-knows-how-long-ago. Alzheimer’s does that – makes it difficult for her to think about changing clothes day in and day out. Much easier to wear the same thing even if she must wash it nightly. Simpler, too, to not think about her hair, to sweep up the thin strands into metal clips stripped of their original tortoise-shell color.

Something about her limp hair loosens a sigh from my chest. We’re Latinas; I always assumed diabetes, cancer or high blood pressure would eventually take my mother, one piece of her at a time. At least the body’s demise is something science and common sense can sometimes predict, prevent or slow. But this? It’s overwhelming to witness the departure of her mind, one memory, one skill at a time. Which is why I bring her to my home for weeks at a time, to give my sister, the main caregiver, a break.

Like others with dementia, my mother responds to routine. It helps her focus. Function. And our nightly routine the past few days has gone something like this:

“What shall I make you for dinner?”

“I’m fine Mom, we have a frozen pizza and salad makings.”

“I’ll make you chicken with vegetables like I make for your sister.”

“Mom, how many times do I have to tell you? I don’t eat meat.”

“But it’s not meat. It’s chicken.”

She can barely remember what she had for breakfast, yet she remembers how to cook some foods. Simple things, mostly. Scrambled eggs. Fried rice. Staples so long ago assimilated into the bones and muscles of her hands that it doesn’t matter if her mind forgets. Her fingers cull grains and crack eggshells of their own accord.

But she made my sister caldo de pollo? How? Her mind is a study in contradictions: She doesn’t recognize some of her siblings, but remembers the shortcuts to her favorite grocery store. She forgets my age, but can count backwards from one hundred in increments of seven.

The losing battle against the black holes sucking away at her brain is the source of my pain. I still recall how her meals could splint the worst breaks, and so this evening, I relented. “Okay, Mom, make me some chicken soup.”

We drove to the store where I loaded a shopping cart with organic free-range chicken, broccoli, carrots and cauliflower. She selected onions and tomatoes, and back home, she went to work.

Now, the aroma of sizzling onions and garlic hits me full force. My stomach – and my heart – awakens, rejoices. For a moment, time stops.

“Can you add salt for me?” she asks. I comply and agree to test for doneness later.

The steam rising from the pot awakens memories: visiting cousins Olga and Lydia in Juárez, Tía Carmen hugging me, placing before me a bowl of her own caldo de pollo. The wings were best, their fatty skin and slivers of meat stretched between the bones; I sucked out every bit, feeling for the slightest string of muscle. Chicken fat flavored the broth, its tiny, gold bubbles floating on the surface.

My grandmother textured her caldo de pollo with bits of rice so soft they dissolved in my mouth. This was before cancer left her moaning in a dark room, grandchildren tiptoeing in and out for brief hellos. This was when she still cooked chicken soup using a bird she’d slaughtered and cleaned herself. At the table, our hands shredded warm corn tortillas and soaked them in the broth – ah!

My mother used to make caldo de pollo the old-fashioned way, too, stewing the chicken for hours. Often, coming home after a day of play, the aroma reached our noses before we even opened the door. Our gratitude at the table went unspoken, but surely not unnoticed: we tilted bowls to slurp up the last drops. My father’s appreciation I gleaned from the concentration on his face, the way he went silent to eat. Even the way his calloused hands cradled his coffee cup, pinky finger extended elegantly despite the laborer’s dirt that lived beneath the nail.

This was all, of course, long before. Before my mother’s life changed, before her children’s bodies stretched into teenagers who wanted burgers, fries, pizza and car dates, before they refused to eat her chicken soup with its tender carrots, celery, onions and potatoes. Before she turned to cookbooks to appease us, but more than that, to lure her husband, our wayward father, back to the family table.

I’m conjecturing now, because in spite of having sampled various dishes she taught herself to make, I don’t recall her turning pages of cookbooks by Julia Child or Better Homes and Gardens. But surely, considering the foods that began appearing at dinner sometime in my adolescence, she spent hours reading recipes in English, wrapping her Spanish-speaking mind around them.

The dish I most recall from that time is coq au vin, chicken in wine sauce, something I’d never seen in the home of my grandmother or any of my tías. Where did she learn to make it? Did she peruse new recipes in frustration? Or did she feel pleasure at creating art for our palates? I wish I knew. Because my mind snags on a single image: My family sits silently at the table as my mother serves coq au vin. The chicken pieces sit on white china, unrecognizable in congealing, red pools. My father smirks, and my brother, sister and I fidget, sensing that something irrevocable has already happened and nothing – especially these reddened lumps – can return things to the way they were.

Looking back, I see something that escaped me then: we children were not the only uncomfortable ones. My father smirked due to his own unease, his inability to communicate and, mostly, I think, at finding himself an outsider at this table and not knowing how to get back into the circle of his own family. He ate the chicken though. My father ate that coq au vin. And then he left my mother anyway, after we kids were grown and she had ceased trying new recipes for him, turning for comfort, instead, to God and ancient saints.

Were I to ask my mother right now if she remembers making coq au vin –  “You know Mom, the chicken with wine that you made from a cookbook?” –  she would look at me blankly and say, “I don’t remember mi’ja.” And I would feel bad for asking.

I’m tired of the “don’t remembers.” She’s tired of my questions. Too often I press, certain that one day I’ll jostle a memory free, “Are you sure you don’t remember? Try. Try to remember.”

So, tonight I don’t ask. I just watch her cover the pot on the stove where it will simmer until it’s done.

When I taste the soup later, the meat is tender between my teeth. It’s the simple flavors though – broccoli seasoned with garlic, onions, salt, pepper and chicken fat – that flood me with nostalgia for the days before. Before my tongue knew the addiction of American fast food, before my mother learned to make coq au vin, before my father left her and dementia took his place.

Beatriz Terrazas is a Dallas-based writer and photographer whose work has either appeared or soon will in The Washington Post, The Dallas Morning News, Heal Magazine, Cure Magazine and More Magazine. She is a member of The Dallas Morning News team that won the Pulitzer in 2004 for a project on violence against women, and she is a Harvard University Nieman Fellow, Class of 1999.