A few years ago, my sister sent me not one, but four Christmas cards — each yuletide message, written in her distinctive, elegant script, more loving than the last.

I saved them carefully, because I sensed these would be the last such messages I would receive from her. The next year, there was no card at all, and I knew we had reached a point of no return. This brilliant woman, my second mother, was not coming back. The relentless progress of Alzheimer’s had become inescapable at last.

As the light of my sister’s mind faded, I wondered: Would this disease also demand that which was dearest to her, her friendship with God? As she forgot husband, children, siblings, even her own name, would she be permitted that one comfort?

It was this hope of solace that I carried with me from the cool California coast to hot, muggy St. Louis one day a few months later. As I rushed to the airport after receiving a frantic phone call, my mind sorted through the chaotic backstory, involving agitation, a fall, and a possible stroke. My sister had been rushed to the hospital at death’s door, I had been told. Once there, she had recovered her strength sufficiently to put up a mighty fight. Her confusion was heart-wrenching but her strength was formidable. Doctors, nurses and her grown children struggled to calm and constrain her — and were slapped and kicked for their efforts.

At some point, distraught, confused, and combative, she began calling my name. Hence the phone call from my weeping niece. Why was my sister calling for me? I wasn’t sure, but I knew her well enough to trust the intangible connection that, over the years, had frequently tipped her off when I was in trouble or misbehaving.

That connection was born of joint sorrow. When I was in grade school, we saw our parents die within three years of each other. My sister — twenty years older than I and raising several children — added me to her lineup of kids. Without missing a beat, she took on the thankless job of raising a child grappling with a great loss at a time when she herself was still reeling from that loss. Shouldering the pain for both of us, she greeted the task with a big smile and made me feel like a treasure, not an imposition.

Nonetheless, our parents’ deaths had uprooted me. After high school, I left my hometown, went to college, married, and raised my family far away — a telling choice in a family where virtually all kith and kin lived within a 20-mile radius. It wasn’t until my own children were on the cusp of adulthood that I appreciated how much of my happy life and strong faith I owed to my sister, and knew how her thoughts and prayers had followed me as I built that life half a continent away.

In recent years, we had talked by phone almost daily, affectionately chatting about my children’s lives and what was going on at home. When dementia began to make conversations challenging, I would simply bring to the table a list of her accomplishments, so she could, for a brief time, remember and appreciate. As her memory began showing serious holes, she doubled down on gratitude. Almost every conversation included the phrase, “We are so blessed.”

The blessings, the accomplishments, were never about material things. In fact, she had never had much in that way — never traveled out of the country, drove a succession of older stretch vans, spent an inordinate amount of time worrying about how bills would be paid.   But she had gifts without number, she told me whenever we spoke, and she would recite the most important: her marriage, her twelve children, their faithful lives and happy families, and her sixty-seven, sixty-eight, sixty-nine (the number was always increasing) grandchildren.

One of the many quotes posted on her refrigerator said it all: “No outside success can compensate for failure in the home.” She once told us kids that a family’s job was to teach all its members how to love. Her philosophy was the more you love, the more love you have to give. She had lived by that belief, and by another: “Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.” Joy was the measure she used to test spirits: if joy was absent from something, she didn’t trust it.

At a family wedding about a year before my sister died, I witnessed the power of those convictions, cultivated over a lifetime of days filled with children, housework, and whoever knocked at her door. As I trailed her into a reception crowded with family and friends, I watched her greet each person she met with her signature smile and a gracious word. One would never know, I thought — marveling at her acting ability — that she was meeting each of these people as if for the first time.

Later, it dawned on me: this was no act. She was merely doing what she had always done — loving the person God placed in her path at each moment of her day. “Listening is an act of love,” was also posted on her fridge, a reminder of the many times I had come home to find someone pouring out their troubles over a cup of coffee.

Now, those friends and visitors had become strangers, a lonely and distressing change.

In every other difficult circumstance, she had turned to Christ. Would he too become a stranger now, chased from her mind along with the rest?

Though her brain might forget him, would her soul remember?

Hope flared that first night in St. Louis, in her dimly lit hospital room.

It had been a long day peppered with confusion. My sister hadn’t remembered her husband’s name — Alvin, Arnold, Howard? When the nurse asked her what her own name was, she begged off, saying, “You know, I’ve had quite a day.”

Sleep was elusive. Every few minutes throughout the night, I would help my sister out of bed and walk her to the bathroom. Then we would head back to bed, get settled in, and say goodnight. I’d pray that maybe this time, sleep would come. But five minutes later, we’d repeat the whole process. It’s a common scenario, just one way that caring for a dementia patient can make you feel as if you, too, are losing your mind.

At one point, weary from the many ups and downs of the night, I leaned my head against the cool door frame and worried. From my sister, there was silence. Then, as if to answer my distress, I heard a prayer: “Hail Mary, full of grace.” The voice I heard was not the tremulous voice of dementia but the strong, convent-educated, beautifully modulated voice of my childhood, reciting the ancient words flawlessly: “… Now, and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

A pause, and then her voice continued serenely. “Dear Jesus, I love you. Mother Mary, I love you so.” The flash of lucidity vanished, but as we resumed our pilgrimage from bed to bathroom and back again, I knew I had witnessed something remarkable.

I would see the phenomenon repeated over the next few months. The bits of clarity, floating intact in a sea of confusion, were nearly always about God, a deep awareness that Alzheimer’s could not touch. My sister never failed to tell her caregivers “God bless you” or “God be with you” — her hallmark blessing. Dementia had removed any human hesitancy to speak of God. “I’ll pray that you come back to the faith,” she told one nurse matter-of-factly. Another became visibly uncomfortable when my sister said, “I’ll pray for you.” She may be demented, I thought, but this woman speaks truth to you.

After a fruitless hospital stay, my sister returned home, where the downward march of Alzheimer’s continued. Her doctor told us we were looking at a matter of months. I went back to California but kept up my trips to the little house on Saint Denis Street, where I’d attempt to make up for my absence by concentrated attention. Always, I was amazed by the patient grace of those — her husband, her children — who were dealing daily with hallucinations, agitation, and a strong will now unfettered from reason. I had seen dementia before, but Alzheimer’s was a particularly nasty beast. And this woman, known for her gentle “hello sweetheart,” was not going gently.

Remarkably, however, amidst a rapidly increasing disconnect with the world around her, my sister’s spiritual connection continued. She could not string a coherent sentence together — yet when we drove past her parish church she never failed to say in a clear voice, “Dear Jesus, we love you.”