“ W e are doomed historically to history, to the patient construction of discourses about discourses, and to the task of hearing what has already been said,” wrote Michel Foucault in The Birth of the Clinic. He was making the methodological point that we are always immersed in the knowledge and terms that precede us, that the language we inherit to comment on the world has already shaped how we will comment. But his contention could double as a description of what it’s like to relate to someone with dementia.

“I know I’ve asked you this before,” my mother often says to me these days. “But where do you live?” New York, I tell her. “I wonder why I can’t remember that,” Mom responds. Because you’re having some memory problems, I advise her. She can’t remember that either. I try to be patient, as Foucault advised. Unlike Foucault, I’m not a student of discourse, and unlike my mother, I’m not a student of history.…