Mary Horton
Richmond, VA
I didn’t realize until shortly before her death how different the world my mother gave me was from the one she was raised in. My mother had Alzheimer’s, and in the last few years of her life, she reverted to some of the attitudes and behaviors she had learned while growing up in rural Virginia in the 1930s and 1940s. I saw her use language and do things that were not tolerated in our home in the early 1960s. I am grateful that she changed and didn’t burden me with what she struggled to cast off.