simply gone from her memory. She only spoke Russian now. As her mental capacity waned, she fell back into the language of her childhood, and I vividly remember writing letters to her in Cyrillic so we could still have contact with her. Lélia asked some Russian friends for an alphabetical key, and we copied it. The whole family did it; we would sit around the dining room table writing out sentences in Cyrillic, and it ended up being a happy, special thing, to write in the language of our ancestors.
