I’m an old man, and my mother is even older than me because that’s the way things work.
She’s 93, and was still sharp as a dagger until March, when she underwent heart surgery. The procedure went fine, and her heart now ticks steady with a pacemaker, but she never fully recovered from the anesthesia. She’s frequently foggy, and too weak to rise from a chair without help.
For years Mom has lived with my sister Katrina, and Mom was independent, made her own meals, read the newspaper, walked to church. Now she’s 99% dependent, needing help any time she’s walking from bed to bathroom, bathroom to living room, etc. She hasn’t been to church since the surgery, because Katrina and I are willing to help in a lot of ways, but we have our limits and neither of us are willing to take Mom to church.
And it’s OK. Mom usually doesn’t know what day it is, so Sundays pass like any other day.
Some days Mom is completely zorked, asleep on her bed or on the couch in the living room, impossible to wake. Other days she’s awake but not really there, can’t or won’t say anything beyond the briefest answers to questions. Ask her “Are you cold, Mom?” or “Are you hungry, Mom?,” and she’ll ignore the question until you’ve asked several times, and then she’ll say, “No,” “Yes,” or “I don’t know.” But some days, maybe one day out of three, Mom’s mostly Mom.
Those good visits start when I tap the top of her head. Mom’s usually sitting in a chair in the living room, but her chair faces away from the front door, so she hasn’t seen me come in. She’s dang near deaf, so she hasn’t heard me say “Hello,” and if I shout “Hello” it startles her and she screams. So I walk to her chair and gently rap a knuckle on her thin-haired scalp from behind, and Mom says, “Oh, is it Douglas?”
Spoiler: It is Douglas. And for the next several hours — at least on a good day — Mom and I don’t talk much, but we trade a few sentences every few minutes. I ask about her childhood or her life, and the answers are still in there. It might take her twenty seconds to access the memories and start talking, but once she starts, she’s lucid and has most of the details. I’ve asked and she’s told me about her father, her mother, her grandparents, her aunts and uncles, and her first and only job, while she was in high school.
Yesterday, she was talking about her father and mentioned his middle name, so I typed it into the internet, and found a photo of his tombstone at findagrave.com. “Do you want to see it,” I asked, “or would it be too sad?”
“He’s been dead for 80 years,” she said. “I’m mostly past the grieving, so yes, please show me the picture.” I did, and she read my granddad’s granite, and then we spent half an hour searching the internet for other dead relatives. “You just type it in, and there it is,” she said, marveling at the internet, and she’s right — the technology is amazing. I found a long obituary for my mother’s grandmother, and surprisingly thorough genealogy for generations of Hollands around the turn of the 19th century to the 20th.
The TV is always on, either MSNOW or CNN, but it’s muted to keep the commercials from making me mental. Mom can’t hear the telly anyway, unless it’s loud enough to rattle the walls, and she reads the captions and chyrons, sometimes out loud.
MSNOW and CNN keep chyrons moving at a dizzying pace, with a news ticker and announcements of who’ll be the “special guest” on whatever show later that day, etc. A couple of weeks ago, on a bad Mom day, for some reason MSNOW froze the news ticker, and Mom read it out loud over and over again, “Iran war marks six months,” “Iran war marks six months,” “Iran war marks six months,” “Iran war marks six months…” It sounded new to her, every time she said it.
But always, there are those better days. When she’s able and willing to chat, I’ve asked and Mom’s told me what crops were planted on the family farm (corn, tomatoes, and carrots, mostly). I’ve asked about boys she dated before meeting my dad, and she said Dad was her first date. I’ve asked about whatever random memories pop out of my head — my childhood, my teachers, what trouble I got into, and my hospital stay after little-kid me was hit by a car, and Mom remembers it all, frequently with more detail than my own memories.
I asked, “What was the first movie you saw?,” and she doesn’t remember the title, but it starred Ronald Colman. And she remembers that movies were forbidden in her family, and the daring three-mile walk into town with a girlfriend, to break the rule and see what was playing at the Straggle Theater.
(That same theater is still there, by the way, still showing movies. We walked past it last summer and again this summer, attending the family reunion in Straggle, which I need to write about soon, before everything that happened gets Alzheimered in my head.)
On the good and even mediocre days, we sing a lot of songs, Mom and me. Mostly hymns. Mom’s always been a megaChristian, and it’s amazing how many hymns she has memorized. I’m not Christian at all, but me and my siblings were raised in the church, and I still know the sacred songs, at least the greatest hits, like “How Great Thou Art,” “Constantly Abiding,” “Holy, Holy, Holy,” and a dozen more (Collect them all!). I’ll sing the first verse and the chorus with Mom, and then she’ll sing the second verse I’ve completely forgotten, and the third verse and the 4th verse. I join in on the chorus.
One afternoon we sang a rousing rendition of “Jingle Bells” (Mom sang all four verses, I sang the chorus), and I asked Mom why there are no Halloween carols. Thought I was being clever, but she immediately burst into “Purple People Eater,” and afterward she said, “I was in my mid-20s when that song came out, and already had three children.”
On good days, Mom remembers and can talk about classes she took in high school and college, and subscribing to the Straggle Chronicle when it switched from weekly to twice weekly. She read the paper from cover to cover even when she was a little girl, and still gets the Seattle Times delivered at home, and reads it cover to cover, though Katrina and I aren’t sure how much she understands. She knows Trump is the President, and knows she doesn’t like him, but that seems to be about it for current events.
For most of my adult life, Mom has gotten on my nerves, and she did it on purpose. She knew I’m an atheist and would ask piercing questions about my eternal soul, then cry that she wouldn’t see me in Heaven. She would ask about a woman I’d dated twenty, now forty years earlier, knowing that woman had broken my heart. She would ask about jobs where I’d been fired. She would phone my office and ask for me, because “Lord knows you never answer your phone at home.” She would show up at my workplace, unannounced, uninvited, and demand that I join her for lunch. She would remind me, often, that she and Dad once had such high hopes for me, that I’d be a doctor or a scientist, but “Look what’s become of you.”
What became of me is, nothing much. I’ve lived my pathetic life as a slacker, a guy who worked just barely hard enough to make the rent, but never had a career, never accumulated any possessions, never had children. And of course my greatest failure, that I hardly ever attend church.
Mom was an absolute expert at driving me crazy, and loved doing exactly that, but these days she doesn’t spar much. It’s been months since she said anything even a little awkward or insulting or judgmental about me. The damnedest thing is, I kinda miss it, but this new Mom is much easier to deal with.
The many, many times Mom and I butted heads were a staple of my writing on this blog, and in the zines that preceded it. It’s the defining fact of me & my mother. Until 2026, I was sure the arguments were what I’d always remember about her. Now, I think these recent months will be my first memory of Mom.
I help my sister take care of my her, and sometimes, when Mom doesn’t know I’m watching, I look at her as she stares at the TV or pours over the Times. What I think is, Look what’s become of you, but it’s not a mean thought, just sad. Time and wrinkles and forgetfulness come for all of us, unless we’re lucky enough to die young.
These quieter times with this new, mellow Mom are nothing much, but they’re sweet. She sings hymns and talks about the old days and watches MSNOW and reads the newspaper and says “It’s Douglas” when I lightly knuckle the top of her head. Sometimes she tells me she loves me, and I answer that I love her, too, and I mean it.
9/10/2026
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