Browse Topics
Dementia
In The Car Ahead
He needs more time to brake / so he drives slow. He needs / more time to read traffic signs / so he drives slow.
April 2020What Are The Odds
That this trip isn’t the stupidest thing he’ll ever do / That they won’t drive one mile before she asks, Where are we going? three times / That she’ll ask why can’t she drive anymore
October 2018Telling Time
We rent a condominium together, my eighty-six-year-old widowed mother and I. Sometimes she summons me from her bedroom at the end of the hall. I have learned to guess from her tone what it is she wants.
November 2017Visiting Her In Queens Is More Enlightening Than A Month In A Monastery In Tibet
For the fourth time my mother / asks, “How many children / do you have?” I’m beginning / to believe my answer, / “Two, Mom,” is wrong.
March 2017Whatever Day It Is
My tester asks me to take a seat in the waiting room while she reviews my score. She wants to see if I have missed anything. I want to tell her I missed my fifties, skipped that whole section of my life, lived anesthetized for a decade, ten years on autopilot — years you think will continue to replicate themselves, dull and identical, until you die. Then the serious aging starts, and you know your fifties as gold poorly spent.
October 2016At The Last Minute
Self-surrendering to prison, saving a life, wishing to have said “I don’t,” instead of, “I do”
September 2016
A Merry Little Christmas
I wonder if my relationship with my mother will improve as her dementia progresses. It would make both our lives simpler. I also wonder how long it will be before I forget what a mango is. Before my home is festooned with post-it notes. Before all my mother’s deficiencies become mine.
May 2016
The Church Of The Gridiron
Steve Almond On How He Lost His Faith In Football
So, yes, the NFL and NCAA have instituted stiff penalties for helmet-to-helmet hits and even redesigned kickoffs to reduce high-speed collisions. But, again, all of this only helps limit concussions. The problem is that the permanent brain injuries arise in part because of those subconcussive hits, the ones players receive nearly every single play, and there’s no way to engineer those out. The tackle will always be part of the game.
September 2015
Creature Comforts
Taking care of my aging parents is the right thing to do. I don’t regret the decision. But when I came here in 2010, I never imagined that I’d have to stay nearly five years. I’m afraid that, on my mother’s ninety-seventh birthday, I’ll be saying that I never imagined I’d have to stay seven years.
August 2015
A Proper Funeral
Here’s a surprise: it turns out you can’t just walk into the assisted-living facility where your mother spent her final years, wrap her dead body in a sheet, and take her out into the woods to bury her.
August 2015
