My mother, Margaret, didn’t recognize my face most days. She’d look at me with these hollow, distant eyes, and I’d just hold her hand and hope for a flicker of something familiar. She had moved past the stage where she could hold a conversation, but she was still there in her own quiet way.

The nursing home cost eighty-four hundred dollars every single month. It was an elite facility with shiny floors and staff that always looked like they were running a race they didn’t want to win.

Honestly, the only person who actually treated my mother like a human being was a night aide named Rosa. She was quiet, patient, and came from Honduras. She had this way of talking to Mom that didn’t sound like she was giving orders to a toddler. She would brush Mom’s hair for twenty minutes every single morning, regardless of how busy the floor was. She told me once that Mom had beautiful silver strands that reminded her of the winters back home. I trusted her with my life, and more importantly, I trusted her with Mom.

Then my brother Gary started showing up more often. He was the one holding the power of attorney. He’d sit in the plastic chairs in the lobby, looking at his watch, complaining about the overhead costs. I remember the night he dropped the bomb at dinner. He sat there cutting his steak, looking annoyed. He told me that Rosa was too slow and that her presence was dragging down the floor’s efficiency ratings. He said we were paying for premium care and that the standard staff could handle everything just as well if we stopped paying for the extras.

I argued with him until I was blue in the face. I told him that Mom knew who Rosa was, even when she didn’t know her own children.

I told him that Mom always said Rosa smelled like clean sheets instead of that harsh, biting bleach the facility used. Gary just waved his hand at me. He told me Mom didn’t know what love was anymore and that she was basically a shell. He fired Rosa the very next week. He went straight to the administrator and told them she wasn’t a good fit, demanding she be scrubbed from the rotation immediately.

A week later, I went to visit Mom on a Wednesday evening. The air in the facility felt different, stale and heavy. The hallway smelled like industrial floor cleaner mixed with the sour, rotting scent of canned peaches left out too long. When I reached her room, she wasn’t in her chair. I found her in the common area, sitting by herself. Her head was slumped way over to the side. She was wearing a sweater that was clearly three sizes too big and definitely didn’t belong to her. Her hair, usually so soft and brushed, was a tangled, matted mess.