Being a senior mama, I’ve stuffed decades of family memories into my cluttered brain. Most are vague, like old, uncaptioned photos in a shoebox, nameless and slowly fading. A few remain vivid, charged with remembered detail by the intensity of …

For Lent this year I’m giving up sleep. This was not a deliberate choice. It was thrust upon me last month—upon all of us—by the sudden death of Sally, our daughter Dara’s diabetes-alert service dog. For the past two years Sally has accompanied Dara everywhere, able to sense a rapidly rising or falling blood glucose level through the genius of her doggie nose. She was trained to alert Dara to these potentially life-threatening changes with a lick to her hand, prompting her to do a finger-prick blood test and correct any irregularities before they result in a medical crisis.

Being a senior mama, I qualify for all those dubious privileges of advancing age that our society offers. Senior coffee at McDonalds. Senior Discount Day at the grocery store on the first Wednesday of every month. And loftiest of all: …

I have never been a dog person. I like the idea of them well enough, but in the course of raising nine kids I’d never before made time in my life to know one well. We had plenty of pets, several dogs among them. Outdoor dogs, all rough and tumble, and only marginally domesticated. They always had more to do with the kids than they did with me, and that was just fine.

Tony, who is 31 years old, doesn’t occupy time and space in the same way we do. In his world, there is only now, which is both a place and a state of being. What he was thinking in yesterday’s now we will never understand. But I want to think he was aware of being lost while he wandered all over Mesa. I hope he missed us, was looking for us. “Why did you turn down this street?” I ask about one unlikely residential neighborhood.

This ballooning is called lymphedema. I will learn ways to control it, but the damage is permanent. I’ll need to ignore the stares and questions, manage the pain of swollen body parts and develop new skills. For now, the cancer battle has been quelled, the treatment frenzy quieted, but the collateral damage involves disabilities I could never have imagined.