I guess I should start from the beginning.  My parents were older when I was born--Mom was 39 and Dad was 44.  I never really noticed that until I was in 6th grade when my dad started having heart problems.  He passed away when I was 21 and he was 66 (actually the day after his birthday).  I stayed at home while I went to college and just never really made a clean break after my dad died.  I lived next door once I finally moved out in my early twenties.  Mom and I had the usual mother daughter issues, but we got along well most of the time.  About 7 or 8 years ago, I started noticing she was having some memory issues.  At first I thought it was what normally happens when someone gets into their 70's but it started to worry me one day after we had a really weird phone conversation.

One Saturday, she called me and said "would you come over to my house for a few minutes?"  Of course I said I would and walked across the yard to her house.  She met me at the door and let me in and we sat down.  This would be the strangest conversation of my life to this point.  She said she was sitting there looking at the pictures in her house and thought to herself didn't I have a daughter?  So she looked me up in the phone book and called me.  That was the first of many times she asked me why I lived so close and she never saw me.  And the equal number of times that I explained I was just there the day before and talked to her on the phone the previous night.  I called her doctor.  He did a number of tests and declared her normal for her age.  He said she was okay, so I assumed he was right.  I should have known it was the beginning of all the craziness.  What was I thinking?