My mother bought me a burial plot for my 50th birthday, right next to the one she bought for herself. My mother will be buried in the Camellia Garden of Floral Hills Cemetery, and before she lost her mind she liked to visit it and admire the tiny square of grass where her body would lie, thinking about me on one side and my infant son on the other. My mother didn’t believe in cremation, and as for a green burial, she’d never heard of it. She picked out a pink casket and a marble gravestone for herself, simultaneously appalling and ridiculous.  My mother makes me so angry sometimes, but then I see her small shiny scalp all pink under her thinning hair, and her trembling hands laid upon my own, and I watch her searching desperately for words of love, trying to snatch them out of the Alzheimer fog, and all my anger drains away and turns to shame. I hope that Alzheimer’s has allowed her to forget all the mean words I ever said or thought about her, and that she does not realize that my dead body will never lie in a concrete vault in Floral Hills Cemetery. Alzheimer’s, a strange kind of grace for her, and a hiding place for me.