When I arrive, Gran is in bed. Joy tells me she’s had a bad night and I try to quell the swirls of anxiety in the pit of my stomach as I head down the corridor to her room. Millie, Gran’s lovely nurse, warned me that one day she may not recognize me at all, that the little pockets of lucid moments will be rarer until they’re non-existent. We’ve been lucky up until now, I know. One day she will be gone completely and in her place will be an old lady who doesn’t remember who she is, let alone who I am. An old lady with no memories, past or present.

She’s sitting up in bed, propped up by two massive pillows, the blankets tucked underneath her armpits. Her hands, folded across the covers, look bony and frail, her skin like rice paper, criss-crossed with blue veins. Her eyes are closed and I stand at the door and watch her for a while, her translucent eyelids, her lashes, once long and dark but now sparse, dusting her weathered pink cheeks. She looks a lot older than her seventy-six years, a shrunken figure in the large bed. On her table is a framed photograph of me when I was a teenager, taken in the garden of her Bristol house underneath the apple tree, hugging her black Labrador, Bruce. I haven’t been in her room since she moved in last year and the sight of the photo brings a lump to my throat and I have to concentrate on not crying. I don’t want Gran to see me upset. Quietly, so as not to wake her, I sit in the chair next to her bed. Opposite is a large window and I can see a tree in blossom outside, the pink petals obscuring half of the glass. She’ll like that, I think, as I take one of her frail hands. I wish I could go back to a time when she wasn’t suffering from dementia. All those years when I sat in her living room, just the two of us, all those missed opportunities to talk, for me to find out about her past.

There is a tray over her bed, as if she’s in a hospital, containing a jug of water and a glass. I pour some for her, just in case she’d like it when she wakes up. And then I sit with her. Enjoying it being just the two of us. As it used to be.

I’m on my phone, reading the work emails I’d missed during the week, when I hear a cough. I look up to see that Gran has woken up. She lies there just staring straight ahead for a few moments, as though trying to get her bearings, until she notices me and then her eyes widen. ‘Who are you?’ she whispers, her voice croaky.