Irmgard was born in 1938 in Marienwerder, West Prussia, near the Baltic Sea. As a child, she fled a village being bombed. She grew up in East Berlin and fled again to the West. In the 1960s she crossed an ocean to marry an American soldier she loved, leaving behind her home, her language, and everyone she knew.

She spent her whole life starting over.  was good at it.

She was a gardener — her yard was always beautiful. She was playful and fierce and funny. She protested wars and defended strangers on subway platforms and lined up her daughter's shoes like little footprints leading down the hall. She was a caregiver for my father after his stroke. She was widowed at 56. She was my best friend.

She was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2013, then re-diagnosed with Frontotemporal Dementia in 2014. I was her 24/7 in-home caregiver from diagnosis until she passed away in August 2020. We were alone. There was no roadmap. There was no backup.

Sometimes, near the end, she thought the bombs were falling again.

She also never forgot my brother Mark — a premature baby who died while my father was in Vietnam, before I was born. Some things live in us so deeply that even dementia can't reach them. Mark was one of those things for her.

And she never forgot me. Not really. Even when she couldn't find the word for what I was to her — whether I was her mother, her sister, or her daughter — she always knew we belonged together. She always knew she loved me.

The disease took so much. It didn't take that.

*Irmgard Rutledge, 1938–2020. My mother. The reason this exists.*