Mami's memory lane...

“Bye, Beach. I love you, too,” she said to me the other day.
Calling me a beach. I guess the unintended mix-up could have been worse, and I decide it is close enough to Breg, the short form of my actual name.
I smile back while holding her delicate, jewellery-adorned hand to kiss its soft back. That same hand that once raised children, prepared meals, and built a business. She suddenly looks vulnerable.
Every weekend, this Queen sits in her favourite left corner of her maroon-coloured sofa, a fat cat beside her eating watermelon, surrounded by several of her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. For years, her family has gathered at her home, which she shares with some of them, for weekly lunches and Eid celebrations.
Some call her “Mami”; others call her “Ma.”
That sofa in the living room has remained a steady constant as Mami’s family has continued to expand and evolve. Yet, more than 15 years after I first met her, when she was on the verge of winning a battle with breast cancer, Mami has slowly become a different version of the grand dame she once was.
Our hands remain entwined as she looks up at the enormous chandelier hanging from the ceiling. She bought it in Dubai, only to discover, after bringing it home, that the shop had packed the wrong one. She drove back five hours that same day to set things right.
Now Mami can no longer drive to Dubai, and not because of the conflict-related concerns that currently worry many other Omanis I know.
She looks at me again. On the large TV in a nearby room, they are still talking about a beach in Africa where she grew up after moving there temporarily from Oman, many decades ago.
Perhaps that explains the mix-up. Besides, I do have a rather unique Dutch name that, when pronounced, sounds like someone scraping their throat (Thanks a lot, Mum!)
The truth is that Mami calling me by the wrong name is funny and sad at the same time. I know I feel safe and familiar to her, yet remembering exactly who someone close to her is has seemingly become something like an itch she sometimes cannot quite scratch. Instead, she sometimes recalls people from fast-fading memories of a distant past.
Now realising my name is not actually Beach, she smiles at me like a little child, with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes. There must have been at least five or ten of us sitting with her in that room, and we all smile and laugh a bit. Not at her. With her.
In moments like this, you laugh to keep the moment from turning heavy, because the underlying cause of the confusion is already heavy enough.
I have seen this type of tender laughter in so many shapes.
A good, old Dutch friend in Amstelveen once took me to say hello to her son sitting in part of the living room, and who, due to his neurodivergence, told me: “Hello, and now please leave”. My space, he meant. His mum laughed so loud. Not at him, but saying, “It is okay.”
Last year, just after being diagnosed with a brain tumour affecting the front-left part of his brain, my father sat at the hospital restaurant with his friends Andrea and Bert. He told them he wanted a blueberry spritz but meant a smoothie. They laughed, and he laughed too. Because it was funny, even though it was not. At his farewell ceremony, Bert recalled the moment: “The man of words, who once created beautiful sentences and shared deeper thoughts, was now lost for words.”
My grandma Hiske, 97 at the time, once circled her hands around her face, as if she was searching for a word, smiling at me.
Once, like a cat, she even wandered off from the nursing home in Amsterdam to her own house.
Although Mami now speaks with less force and mostly observes, we do still catch glimpses of the other versions of the woman she has been.
As a strong woman accustomed to her self-sufficiency, she senses that she is now slowly being deprived of it. She is worried about becoming a faint version of the force, a powerhouse, the outspoken head of the family for which she has been known for many years.
“I want to go home,” she sometimes says. None of us is sure which home she means. She has had several over the years, although she is now in her own home in Muscat, surrounded by family who have made sure she can remain there.
I read about an 85-year-old Dutch woman who had to move to a nursing home on another island, away from her 90-year-old husband. In the Netherlands, adult children rarely take elderly parents into their homes, so her husband now spends an entire day travelling to visit her.
Their story reminded me of The Notebook. And so does Mami’s family, who remain devoted to all her versions: The Grand Dame, the Powerhouse, and the one who mistook me for a beach.

Bregje van BaarennThe writer is a freelance contributor