Watering the lilies at the back of section 43, I realize the soil doesn’t care about the grammar of the hands that till it. The dirt is indifferent to the syntax of sorrow. I am Priya E., and my days are spent among the silent, tending to the 13 different varieties of perennials that mark the boundary between what we remember and what we bury. It is a quiet life, one governed by the seasonal rotation of $33 bags of mulch and the steady, rhythmic scrape of my spade against the earth. Just yesterday, I found myself standing in a warehouse, staring at two identical sets of pruning shears. One was $23, the other $43. They were forged from the same steel, likely in the same factory, yet one carried a brand name that promised a longevity the other didn’t. I stood there for 13 minutes, weighing them, wondering if the extra $23 was a tax on hope or a genuine investment in the future. I bought the cheaper ones. The trees don’t know the price of the blade that shapes them.

My mother is currently forgetting the price of everything. More specifically, she is forgetting the English words for the things she once valued. Satwant, a woman who spent 53 years perfecting the crisp, BBC-inflected vowels of a colonial education, is retreating. It began with the nouns-the small, domestic things like ‘saucepan’ or ‘remote.’ Then, the verbs started to fray. Now, at 73, she has almost entirely abandoned the linguistic architecture of her adult life. She is moving back to the village, not in body, but in breath. She speaks Punjabi to the walls, to the television, and to the caregiver who comes to sit with her. When she looks at me, there is a flicker of recognition, but it is quickly clouded by the frustration of a woman trapped in a house where the doors only open inward. She speaks to me in the thick, melodic tones of her childhood, and I, the daughter who was raised on Shakespeare and Saturday morning cartoons, can only catch about 23 percent of what she is saying.

This is the performance. It was the armor she wore to navigate the 33 years she spent working as a clerk in a city that never quite learned to pronounce her name. It was a tool, a necessary piece of equipment, like the $13 wrench I keep in my truck. It got the job done. It allowed her to raise me, to argue with the landlord, and to claim a space in a culture that demanded she assimilate or starve. But now that the executive function is failing, she no longer has the strength to hold the armor up. The performance is over, and the authentic self-the girl from the Punjab who chased goats and recited 103 lines of Gurbani before breakfast-is all that remains.

I find myself mourning the loss of the woman who spoke my language, even as I sit across from the woman who gave me life. It’s a specific kind of grief, one that feels like standing on the shore of a country you can no longer enter without a visa you don’t possess. I try to meet her halfway. I dig through the 13 or so Punjabi phrases I have stored in my head, leftovers from summer holidays and half-heard conversations in the kitchen. I say ‘Acha’ and ‘Theek hai,’ but these are thin, flimsy bridges. They cannot support the weight of the relationship we once had. We used to discuss politics, the price of real estate, and the 3 reasons why I should have married a doctor. Now, our conversations are reduced to the physical: the warmth of a cup of tea, the texture of a blanket, the 33 minutes we spend sitting in the sun without saying a word.

The Cruelty of Lost Language

There is a peculiar cruelty in watching the person who taught you how to speak lose the ability to understand you. I wonder which version of her was the real one. Was it the woman who meticulously corrected my English essays when I was 13? Or is it this woman, the one who laughs at jokes I don’t understand and calls me by her sister’s name? Perhaps the performance of English was more authentic than I give it credit for. Maybe the labor of translation is where the love lived. She worked so hard to speak to me in my world, and now that she has returned to hers, I am too lazy, or perhaps too frightened, to follow her.

I recently spent 53 minutes looking at old photographs, trying to find the point where the shift began. In a photo from 1983, she is standing in front of our first house, her jaw set, her eyes bright with the effort of belonging. She looks like a woman who could conquer any language. In a photo from 2003, she is softer, the English now a comfortable skin. But in the photos from last year, there is a hollowness. It is the look of someone who is realizing the map they’ve been using for 43 years is suddenly written in a script they can no longer decode. It is the look of a traveler who has reached the border and realized they left their passport in a drawer they can’t find.

Finding the Right Support

Finding a way to support her during this transition has been a journey of trial and error. We went through 3 different agencies before we realized that clinical competence wasn’t enough. She didn’t just need someone to check her vitals; she needed someone who could hear the music in her sentences. When we finally connected with Caring Shepherd, the atmosphere in the house changed almost overnight. They matched us with a caregiver who understood the specific cadence of my mother’s retreat, someone who didn’t look at her as a broken English speaker, but as a whole person speaking a different truth. It wasn’t about fixing the language; it was about honoring the person who remained beneath the words. It allowed me to step back from being a frustrated translator and return to being a daughter, even if that daughterhood now exists in the silent spaces between us.

Multilingual Landscapes of Silence

Working in the cemetery, I see families bring all sorts of tributes to the graves. Some bring 3 red roses, others bring plastic flowers that cost $3 at the discount store. It doesn’t matter. The gesture is the same. We are all trying to communicate across a gap that cannot be bridged by words. I see people talking to headstones in 13 different languages, their voices rising and falling in the afternoon air. I realize that I am not the only one whose primary relationship has moved into a territory beyond speech. The cemetery is a multilingual landscape of silence, and in that silence, there is a strange kind of equality.

Bridging the Divide

I’ve started trying to learn more Punjabi. Not to be fluent-I think I’m about 23 years too late for that-but to show her that I am willing to walk a few steps into her woods. I want to be able to say more than just ‘Are you hungry?’ I want to be able to tell her that I remember the way she used to braid my hair when I was 3, even if I have to say it with my hands instead of my tongue. I am learning that communication is 93 percent presence and only about 7 percent vocabulary. If I sit with her and hold her hand while she tells a story about a monsoon in 1953, it doesn’t really matter if I don’t know the word for ‘lightning.’ I know the sound of her fear, and I know the sound of her relief.

Letting Go, Embracing Freedom

There is a specific kind of peace that comes when you stop fighting the inevitable. I used to spend 43 minutes every visit trying to force her back into English. I would correct her, I would prompt her, I would show her flashcards like she was a child. I thought I was helping her stay ‘connected.’ I didn’t realize that I was actually the one who was disconnected. I was trying to keep her in a world that was becoming increasingly painful for her to inhabit. Once I let go of the English Satwant, I was able to meet the Punjabi Satwant, and she is actually quite wonderful. She is funnier than the English version. She is more prone to singing. She is, in many ways, more free.

In my work at the cemetery, I often think about the $83 I spent on a specific granite sealer that turned out to be no better than the $13 version. We spend so much energy on the external, on the preservation of the surface, on the language we use to present ourselves to the world. But at the end of the day, it’s the underlying structure that matters. The soul doesn’t have a mother tongue. It doesn’t need to conjugate verbs or worry about the price of identical items in a marketplace of shifting values. It just is. My mother is teaching me how to be, without the clutter of the 103 things I thought defined her. We are down to the essentials now. The sun is setting over the 13th row of headstones, and I have to go home. I will sit with her, and we will exist in the 23 minutes of twilight together, two women separated by a language but held by a history that needs no translation.