She asks how your examination results went, and you tell her as she beams and presses an ang pow into your hand, refusing to let go until you promise to eat properly. Ten minutes later, she asks the same question again. You answer her again, and nobody around the table thinks much of it.

She salts the lotus root soup twice, using a recipe she has cooked since before your mother was born, and she covers the pot quickly before anyone can notice, because she has always been proud like that.

A man claiming to be from the bank telephones one afternoon and speaks very politely, and she is reading out an OTP code when you walk in and take the phone from her ear. She stays furious all evening, because she raised four children on a hawker stall’s margins and could smell a cheat at fifty paces. Alzheimer’s has taken her verification system, not her common sense.

The family finally brings her to see a doctor, and she sits through the questions and the little tests with the patient, slightly amused air of someone humouring a fuss she does not think is necessary. The results come back a week later. Alzheimer’s disease, the doctor says, and the word lands in the room the way words like that do, quietly, and then all at once.

The family gathers on a Sunday afternoon with a cake from the bakery she used to disapprove of, and she is, for one whole afternoon, entirely herself. She remembers every cousin’s name, teases your uncle about his second helping of noodles, and tells the story of the year the hawker stall flooded with such precision that everyone puts down their chopsticks to listen. Afterwards your mother whispers that perhaps the doctors were wrong, and for a few weeks the whole family allows itself to believe it.

She gets lost on the walk home from the pasar she has visited for thirty years, and a neighbour eventually finds her at a junction she has crossed ten thousand times, holding bags of ikan bilis and staring at the road as though it were new.

The extended family is gathered under one ballroom chandelier, and she looks straight at you across the round table and calls you by your mother’s name, then by your uncle’s. An aunt quietly corrects her twice before your mother reaches across and takes her hand, and when she stops trying altogether she switches into Hokkien, and the sentences come more easily than they have all evening.

She looks at you with the polite caution of a person who suspects she should know you but cannot place you, and something in that look hurts more than everything that came before it. You introduce yourself anyway, and she offers you the same laugh she has always had, because her manners have survived everything the disease has taken so far.

She no longer knows your name, but when you take her hand she holds on firmly, the way she used to pull you across the road, and when your uncle plays her old Teresa Teng record, her fingers find the rhythm on the tabletop before anyone notices. She still reaches for her tea at the same hour every afternoon, still frowns when the newsreader speaks too quickly, and still taps the table twice when your uncle pours her tea, in the old silent courtesy of thank you.

The small ceremonies of who she is have outlasted the filing cabinet of facts.

She no longer speaks, no longer walks unaided, no longer reaches for her tea at the old hour. But she is still breathing, still here in the room with you, her chest rising and falling in the quiet the way it has every day since the beginning. Alzheimer’s has taken almost everything it came for.