Grandma doesn’t know who I am. When my cousin Shannon got married a few years ago, I sat at Grandma’s table while the bride and groom were cutting the cake. When I got up to go back to my own table, my grandma asked my dad who I was.

So when I visited Grandma at the memory care nursing home on New Year’s Day a few months later, it didn’t bother her that I wandered off to talk to someone else.

I’d heard that my high school AP Euro teacher, Mr. Toy, was living there. My aunts had told me that Mr. Toy was still very young—and very clever—and they really weren’t sure why he was there. While Grandma was distracted, I snuck away from our family dinner in the conference room and headed for the community living room.

I found Mr. Toy right away.

He was wearing a white short-sleeved button-down shirt tucked into gray pants, just like he did in 1992. He wore glasses, and his hair was still jet black.

But he was rail-thin.

In my memories, his large Buddha belly tumbles over the belt of his pants, and his shirt buttons seem to hang on to their buttoned holes for dear life. In my head, he’s smoking a pack of KOOLS, waving his hands, and talking loudly about the rise and fall of Stalin.

He was passionate. Maybe too much so—we all suspected he was a socialist, and we often called him Comrade Toy when we thought he couldn’t hear. 

He was commanding. He called everyone Mr. or Miss, by last name, and hearing him bellow your name—especially if your back was turned to him and you knew you’d just been caught doing something unacceptable—was like watching your own house burn down in slow motion. You knew hell was coming for you.

And you knew it was your own damn fault.

The most intimidating thing about Mr. Toy, though, wasn’t his passion or his voice. It was his vast knowledge. He seemed to lecture with no notes, and while we had to read our textbook on our own, he never seemed to use it in class. My lecture notes from his class are the reason I did well on the exam. I memorized where everything was, on what pages, and could recite Mr. Toy’s exact words about Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, about Henry VIII and how his desire to get divorced created the English church, about Stalin’s questionable psychology. Sure, I was a studious kid and might have done just fine with a lesser lector. But even today, close to 30 years later, Mr. Toy’s teaching, and not his course textbook, rings in my ears.

The rail-thin Mr. Toy standing in front of me in my grandma’s nursing home seemed to be a different man. I introduced myself, City Honors Class of 95, and he smiled.

“Those were great years,” he smiled. “What are you doing now?”

“I’m a teacher,” I said. “I think a lot of my classmates are teachers now.”

He asked where I taught, what I taught, and what classes I enjoyed most. He loved that I was teaching a media class and recalled his own stint as a film teacher. He loved that I could see the influence his teaching colleagues, like Mr. Soffin, my math teacher, and Mr. Duggan and Mr. LaChiusa, my English teachers, had on my own classroom.

But by the time we wrapped up our conversation, it was clear he did not remember me. He did not remember my classmates. And much of his booming personality, the one that seemed to ooze out of his every word in 1992, was gone.

I returned to my family dinner just in time for coffee and dessert. Several more cousins and their parents had arrived since I departed, and there were now over 25 of us from three different generations gathered around the giant conference room table. Ravioli and meatballs were still being passed around, and tin after tin of leftover homemade Italian cookies sat between glasses of pop, coffee mugs, and full-sized desserts. Slush cake was being sliced, cannoli chips were being opened, and apple pie was being served. Grandma wasn’t speaking to anyone; she was, instead, poking at the piece of slush cake in front of her, but all around her, voices laughed, chimed, sighed, and called. Despite her silence, the room around her buzzed.

I sat down beside my mother, who was similarly poking at her slush cake.

“Did you find him?” she asked.

I nodded. “He seemed pretty sharp,” I said, “but he didn’t know me.”

“Does that matter?” she asked.

It didn’t. It didn’t matter at all. What mattered was the way his voice still boomed in my memory, the way his words still sounded in my ears, the way my classmates, his students, had become teachers, too. His failing memory didn’t matter. What mattered was what he had given us.

The buzz in the room that New Year’s Day mattered, too, the way we had come together around one table, around one woman, to commune. Grandma’s silence didn’t matter. Her failing memory didn’t matter. What mattered was what she had given us—her name, her words, her recipes, her care. All of her was still there, splayed out on that table in front of us, resonating in our busy voices and our hungry mouths, and forever thriving in our own memories, where Grandma was always and would always be whole.