Dementia can alter someone's personality and change how how they interact with the world. But sometimes, it can also lead to moments of profound connection. Jenny McPhee writes about one of those moments, in her piece, "Refreshing a Mother's Memory with Love and Stories."

It's read by Zoe Saldana. She has starred in "Avatar" and "Guardians of the Galaxy," and you can see her next month in "Missing Link." And she's also the founder of the new media platform BESE.

Where Are They Now?

And there have been other changes, and, in some ways, an unexpected silver lining.

"I'm going to be brutally honest: she's a much nicer person," Jenny says. "She was always lovely and everybody adored her, but she had a side to her that had an edge, and she could be very manipulative. She cannot be manipulative now at all. So she's just lovely. And I feel really lucky because I know with dementia that it can go many different ways. But she went soft."

"Every time I walk into her house in New Jersey she comes up to me and she just throws her arms around me and says, 'Oh, I'm so happy to see you.' She has no idea who I am. But she knows something that gives her that impulse to do that with me, and it makes me feel like the most beautiful, important, wonderful person on earth."

And Jenny still thinks about the moment she wrote about in her piece.

"This experience is heartbreaking from beginning to end. But mom, in this experience with Joan that I then wrote about, kind of showed us how to be with her," Jenny says. "I feel like she really just wants us to be present with her in the moment. And it's an incredible gift. At the same time as it being really difficult, it's also an alternate way of being in our world, and I'm grateful for that experience."

Voices in this Episode

Zoe Saldana arrives at the Oscars on Sunday, Feb. 22, 2015. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)