Mom’s 90-something and in a lot of pain, with a hairline fracture of her whatchamacallit after a recent fall. She’s wobbly walking, and can’t stand from bed or a chair without help. Her memory flickers, though, and she forgets that she can’t stand without walking.
She lives with my sister Katrina, who dedicates every day to tending to Mom — making sure she takes her meds, eats three meals, and gets to the toilet in time, and cleaning her up when Mom doesn’t get to the toilet in time.
I’m at their house every day, helping Mom but mostly helping Katrina by giving her a few hours’ break. Once or twice a month, Katrina takes a night off, and I sleep in the recliner in the living room, making sure Mom takes her meds, eats three meals, and gets to the toilet in time, and cleaning her up when Mom doesn’t get to the toilet in time.
She’s accustomed to having Katrina tend to her diapers and messes, but when I’m there instead, Mom’s amusingly shy about accepting my help, cuz, you know, I’m a guy. She’ll spend half an hour in the bathroom, trying to get her wet diapers off, wiping herself down, then struggling to pull up clean diapers, when I could do it all for her in five minutes, and do a tidier job. Nope. Mom only asks for my help in the bathroom when she’s exhausted.
Last weekend was one of my sleepovers, and it went fairly well, with only one diaper disaster. For most of the weekend, Mom read her book, or sang hymns with me, and there’s very nearly nothing to tell about it that I haven’t told already, except for this moment from Sunday morning:
Sitting in her wheelchair in the living room, Mom eyed an article of clothing that had been tossed across the couch, and said, “I’m cold, give me that green sweater, please.”
Mom owns two green sweaters, but this wasn’t one of them, wasn’t a sweater at all. It was my shirt, which I’d peeled off earlier, while I’d been dealing with Mom’s diapers. Wanted to keep the shirt clean-ish, and I’d been walking around ever since in just my t-shirt and britches.
“That’s my shirt,” I ‘splained. “It’s probably too big for you.”
“Let’s find out,” she said, so I handed her my shirt, and helped her pull it over her pinstriped aqua-marine and American Flag blue blouse. Mom always wears color-coordinated clothes, and owns bins full of brightly-colored shirts, pants, sweaters, socks, shoes, and hair ribbons, which she mixes and matches eccentrically. Even now, in her final days, she dresses in brilliant but stylish colors every morning, all of it purchased at thrift stores.
I’m 6XL and she’s a small, so the shirt was baggy on Mom, which actually made it work as a sweater. It kept her a little warmer for half an hour or so, until without warning she barfed on it.
“Sorry,” she said. “I thought it was just gonna be a burp.”
After making certain she was feeling OK (“Never felt better,” she said, “except for the endless back pain”), I wiped most of her puke off my shirt, or into it. I’d been prepping a load of laundry anyway, so I tossed the shirt in with her wet sheets and soiled pants, and fetched Mom’s green sweater for her to wear.
A few hours later, I put the green shirt on, fresh and staticky from the dryer. Mom read her book in her wheelchair and I read mine on the couch, until I fell asleep. When I woke, a puddle of my drool and the Snickers bar I’d been eating were melted into that same green shirt, so I peeled it off again and washed it in a load by itself.
It’s all only fair, really. How many thousand times did Mom change my diapers when I needed it? Now I change hers, when she lets me.
And there’s no such thing as clean clothes; only clothes that are temporarily not dirty. Watching my green shirt tumble alone in the dryer was proof, almost literally, that what goes around comes around.
7/6/2026
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