In the photograph I’m thinking about, I was around two years old, sitting on the den sofa in the house where I grew up, dressed for bed in a long-sleeved white T-shirt with matching footie pajama bottoms. The sofa upholstery was a blue and green patchwork pattern with so much going on that even Carol Brady might have taken a look at it and said, “Hey, Sims family—I think you could probably tone down the color palette a few notches.” But as the picture clearly shows, that crazy ’70s sofa was the perfect contrast to the blonde wood paneling behind it, and if the pattern was too busy, I certainly didn’t seem to mind. My favorite toy, a wooden clock, was resting against my right leg, but I’d fixed my attention on what was going on to my left. That’s where Mama, dressed in her satin housecoat, was singing a made-up song as she carefully combed through the curls in my favorite doll’s hair.
Mama wasn’t wearing any makeup; if I had to guess, she’d probably cleaned her face with Merle Norman cleansing cream and then followed up with Merle Norman Aqua-Lube moisturizer. (Back then Mama wouldn’t dream of using anything other than Merle Norman products; she was adamant that everything else aggravated her sensitive skin.) She’d bobby-pinned sections of her copper-colored hair in order to prevent an epic case of bedhead the next morning; Mama might not be high-maintenance in many areas, but like so many Southern women, she has always been meticulous about her hair.
What stands out most to me in that picture, though, is something most people probably wouldn’t see—something I know way down deep in my bones, something that I know my sister and my brother would see in that picture, too.
When she was with her children, Mama had all the time in the world.
No matter what Mama was doing with us when we were little, she was unrushed, unhurried, and uninterested in doing anything other than being right where we were. Family was always her biggest priority, and we knew it. Looking back, in fact, I recognize that there was a whole lot she didn’t do so that she could be home with us; she never served on a bunch of committees or went on girls’ trips or jumped on board with the latest mom-trends. She just liked to be home.
And that didn’t change when we three kids (sort of like “We Three Kings,” only not at all like that) started to get a little older.
Since I’m the youngest in our family by ten years, I was the only child at home by the time I was seven, and if I didn’t know it before, my elementary school years taught me how happy it made Mama to have all her people under one roof. If Sister planned to come home for a weekend, Mama would dust and fluff the house for days beforehand, changing sheets and turning back beds and cleaning windows. Then she’d spend a full afternoon steaming broccoli for Chicken Divan, cooking peas, frying okra, making squash casserole—whatever she thought would make Sister the happiest. If Brother happened to be on a break from college, Mama would go to Burnett’s Grocery and ask the butcher to cut up five or six chicken fryers. Then she’d spend the rest of the day moving pots and skillets from the stove to the oven and back again so that come suppertime, she could serve a Southern feast: fried chicken, rice and gravy, butter beans, fresh tomatoes, corn, and pound cake.
When I left for college the pattern continued; my meal of choice for weekends at home was always Mexican cornbread or anything that prominently featured potatoes, oh hallelujah. And for holidays or special occasions that brought all the children—which, by my junior high years, included Sister’s husband, Barry—home at the same time, Mama would TURN IT OUT with the hospitality: gallons (seriously, gallons) of her homemade chicken salad, more fresh vegetables than you could shake a stick at, the most delicious, perfectly seasoned turkey breast east of the Mississippi, creamed potato casserole (can I get an amen?), beef tenderloin, homemade rolls, you name it.
And all that food set the stage for what seemed like nonstop conversation. Mama always wanted to hear what our friends were up to, and she loved to catch us up on the latest hometown news. Daddy and the rest of the men in the family would usually move to the den to watch a game or pass around the newspaper, but the women would sit in the room off of Mama’s kitchen for hours, swapping stories and drinking coffee and occasionally even scratching each other’s backs (it’s a thing in my family—we are all like a pack of cats in that regard). It might just be Mama, Sister, and me, or it might be the three of us plus an assortment of aunts and cousins and friends. But regardless of numbers, Mama was her happiest and most content when she was at home with her people.
She had all the time in the world for us.
And I think it’s safe to say that no matter how old we got, we never left Mama and Daddy’s house feeling hungry.
It was certainly true for our stomachs. But it was also true for our souls.
As Brother, Sister, and I grew up—the finish-college-get-jobs-buy-homes-settle-down-kind of growing up—Mama, who is mostly known as “Mama Ouida” in my hometown—continued to pour her life into ours. She loved to visit us in Memphis and Nashville and Baton Rouge, loved to help us decorate, loved to cook for us, loved to visit with us. And then, after Brother married Janie and grandbabies entered the picture, Mama loved to rock those baby boys, loved to swaddle them after their baths, loved to cook them pancakes and make them chocolate pies and scratch their backs for two or ten or ninety-four minutes.
(I really wasn’t joking about the back scratching.)
(PACK-O-CATS.)
After David and I moved to Birmingham and Alex came along a few years later, Mama would stay at our house for a week at a time, usually, and it proved to me once and for all that serving her family was the great joy of her life. She loved nothing more than tackling every bit of our laundry over the course of a day (I have long contended that by Mama’s standards, one towel totally qualifies as a full load), hanging out with Alex, shopping with me at Home Goods and Stein Mart, making up beds so they looked like something at the Four Seasons, and tending to the ferns on our front porch with as much care as she would show her family. She has always loved to make things beautiful, and there was something about the way she folded towels and organized cabinets and rearranged picture frames that brought order and peace into what sometimes resembled chaos. I would beg her to rest, to take it easy, to let us wait on her, and she always had the same response: she’d grin, point her finger, and say, “Sophie? Hush. This is what I love to do. Let me do it.”
So we did.
About four years ago, though, something shifted. It was subtle, and really, at first, it was a just a general impression of the tiniest, slightest distance. Ever since I was in college, Mama and I talked two or three times a week—even if a phone call only lasted a few minutes—and the result was a two-decades-long running conversation about, well, pretty much everything. Somewhere around Mama’s eightieth birthday, though, the phone calls started to diminish in frequency. Sometimes Mama wouldn’t call for a week or two, and when I’d call her, she’d uncharacteristically cut our conversations short; she’d say she wasn’t feeling well, she didn’t have any news, she was cleaning out closets (this excuse was actually the most feasible, because Mama derives more joy from a well-functioning closet than could probably be considered normal). Over and over I’d remind myself that she was eighty and perfectly entitled to talk or not talk as little or as much as she wanted, and Sister would often add the perspective that sometimes it gets difficult for older people to carry on phone conversations. None of that, however, changed the fact that I missed her. And since I knew she was physically healthy—save a few aches and pains common to the twilight years, of course—I found myself frustrated by the fact that she didn’t seem to want to spend as much time with all of us.
It was just—I don’t know—weird.
Later that same year Mama and Daddy came to our house for the week of Thanksgiving, and the only way I know to explain the general vibe of that visit is that Mama didn’t want to talk. She wasn’t rude at all—she wouldn’t dream of that—but for the first time ever, she didn’t want to sit down and have a conversation. She wanted to organize Alex’s closet and clean out his toys and sweep the deck and vacuum the rugs. And while I know y’all probably think it’s strange for me to be talking about an eighty-year-old woman who WOULD NOT SIT DOWN, you have to consider that my parents have always been incredibly active. Daddy pretty much does all the same things he did at fifty-five (with the exception of officiating football and basketball games—though he still loves to run a game clock), and Mama’s eightieth birthday hadn’t tempered her ability to GET AFTER IT. She was slower, absolutely, but her commitment to the task at hand was the same as it had always been.
What I missed, I guess, was the balance she’d always had. I missed how she’d drink coffee and thumb through a Southern Living magazine while she chatted about how she’d like to decorate her front porch. I missed hearing her imitate family members’ voices when she’d tell stories. I missed the sound of her laugh. I wanted her to sit down and talk like she’d always done, but she wasn’t having it, and after a couple of days, I decided she must be mad at me. I wondered if she thought I made a mistake going back to work full-time, if I hurt her feelings in some way, or if my inability to keep up with laundry had finally driven her to the brink of frustration. None of that made any logical sense to me, but the change in her disposition was like a puzzle I couldn’t solve.
After three or four days of watching Mama focus nonstop on chores, the distance was driving me crazy (which was the craziest thing considering that she was right here in my house). My hope was that we could have a conversation about whatever was going on, so I walked down the hall to Alex’s room, which was the last place I’d seen her. I will never forget that I found her in Alex’s closet, moving plastic bins of hand-me-downs from one side to the other, and as gently as I knew how, I said, “Mama, please stop. Seriously. Please stop working. We want to spend time with you. You’ve been doing stuff like this ever since you got here, and in addition to the fact that we don’t want to see you work like this, we miss you.”
At that point I could tell that I was about to cry, but I choked back the tears because EASY ON THE DRAMA, GLADYS.
And here’s the part I will never forget.
Mama looked at me, smiled half-heartedly, and sighed. Then she said, “Well, I don’t know what to say. But I’m so happy cleaning. And really, I guess I’m just not much of a conversationalist.”
It was the oddest response, I thought. And considering that Mama had been holding court at our family gatherings for most of my life, it wasn’t even the tiniest bit true.
Clearly, though, she believed it.
She turned around and walked back in the closet.
And that was that.
On Labor Day of last year, Mama and Daddy came to our house for a long weekend (Martha, too! Martha was here! She was just so happy to be here!), and as we normally do, we planned a big day-o-shopping for Saturday. For most of my life Mama has been on a perpetual hunt for “a good, black knit top”—you can never have enough, I reckon—and Martha’s ever-evolving like-to-find list (I believe I mentioned it a few chapters ago) ensures that she always has something to look for. So Saturday morning, after everybody was up and dressed and ready to go, Mama, Martha, and I set off for the first stop on our shopping adventure: Nordstrom Rack.
As soon as we got to the store, Mama and I walked over to look at a rack of skirts while Martha headed in the direction of some jackets (IMAGINE THAT). I was hoping to find a few things to wear to work, so I pointed toward a section of blouses and told Mama that I was going to look there for a few minutes. Eventually I put a couple that I liked into my shopping cart before I turned and asked Mama if she wanted to look at shoes, but she shook her head.
“I’ll just stay here,” she said.
It was maybe ten minutes later—after I’d tried on about four pairs of booties along with a wedge or three—when I started to wonder what Mama was doing. I pushed my cart out of the shoe section and into the back aisle of the store, doing my best to look over the racks in the hopes of spotting Mama’s light silver hair. I walked the perimeter of the store without seeing her, and as I started my second loop, I realized that a vague panic was settling over me. It was a feeling similar to a few years before when I walked outside to call Alex in for supper and he was nowhere to be found. It turned out that he was playing next door, thank goodness, but for the two or three minutes when I couldn’t find him, my legs felt like they were made of Jell-O.
My reaction in Nordstrom Rack wasn’t quite that extreme, but still, I was concerned. When I reached the front of the store for the second time, I looked outside—which, in retrospect, was a strange choice—but for some reason I was scared that Mama had wandered off. I kept having flashbacks to my Uncle Joe and his Alzheimer’s and one time when he got disoriented in a restaurant, so I told myself that I’d make one more loop, and if I didn’t see her, I was going to call Daddy and David for help. I couldn’t call Mama—because she doesn’t have a cell phone.
I KNOW.
By the time I started my third loop, I was worried out of my mind, though I couldn’t put my finger on why. After all, we’ve shopped together and gotten separated and found each other hundreds of times over the course of my life. But this was different. I couldn’t have told you how, exactly, but I knew that it was. And I kept looking.
At the end of my third loop, I had started to reach for my phone when I spotted her. She was sitting in a chair at the front of the store, and I tried to control my voice as I ran up to her.
“Mama? Mama! Where have you been? Mama! I’ve been looking for you everywhere!”
And y’all, there was something about the way she looked at me that stopped me in my tracks. It only lasted a split-second—just a tiny sliver of time—but I knew she was confused. I still don’t know exactly what happened; maybe she was scared, maybe she reached back in her mind for my name and couldn’t find it, maybe she couldn’t figure out why I was running up to her in a strange store. Regardless of why, it was clear that something about that whole situation was a mystery to her. It was about thirty seconds before her face relaxed, and when it did, she smiled.
So I asked her the question again.
“Mama? Where have you been? I’ve been looking for you everywhere!”
After a long pause, she answered me very slowly:
“Well. I’m right here.”
And she was.
She was right there.
And that was all that mattered.
The following Christmas, as Sister has said so many times since, was a humdinger.
In November and December, we’d had several conversations with Daddy about Mama’s health, mostly wondering what was going on and what would be the best way to help her. Eventually we decided that a head-to-toe physical was in order, so we made her a doctor’s appointment for mid-January. Mama was still as kind and loving as she’d ever been, but she was even more reserved and quiet than she’d been that time when I tried to talk to her in Alex’s room. Plus, when she and Daddy came to our house for Thanksgiving, they planned to spend the weekend with us but only stayed one night. Mama said she was ready to go home, and we didn’t argue with her. Somehow we could tell that home was what she needed.
Christmas, however, made us hopeful. With the exception of Thanksgiving, Mama began to embrace a new pattern when she’d visit. As I cooked or cleaned up or moved clothes from the washer to the dryer, she’d settle in a chair right off the kitchen, wrap up in a blanket, look at magazines, drink a glass of tea, or—no kidding—she’d re-read my first book. I never asked her why she read it so often, but one night, when I walked past her bedroom and she was sitting up in bed, reading the book again, I stopped, poked my head in the door, and said, “Mama? Aren’t you sick of it yet?”
She grinned and said, “No. I’m not.” That sweet response actually nagged at me, mainly because I’d noticed that Mama’s sentences were getting shorter. I told David several times that Mama seemed to answer questions in as few words as possible, which meant we heard a lot of cheerful yeses and nos in her distinctive Mississippi drawl. Sister and I tried to remind each other that given Mama’s age, things weren’t going to be the same as they’d always been, but there was no denying the change in her speech pattern.
And it bothered us.
Mama and Daddy had been in Memphis at Brother and Janie’s house for several days before Christmas, so they drove to our house on Christmas Day. And I realize that right now there are probably several of you who are thinking, What in the world? Why are your eighty-something parents on the road on Christmas? Well, that’s because it’s HOW MY DADDY LIKES IT. He is an eighty-four-year-old man in a fifty-five-year-old body, and he’s basically up for a road trip on any given day of the week—provided he can play eighteen holes of golf and then walk four miles before he loads the car and hits the road. He’s remarkable.
Within an hour of their arrival, Sister and I knew that something was off. Mama seemed nervous—frantic, almost—and after she went into the guest room and shut the door for probably the fourth time, Sister followed her. I was in the kitchen, trying to finish cooking supper, so I couldn’t hear what they were saying. But about a half hour later, Sister walked into the kitchen.
“What in the world is going on?” I asked. “Is Mama okay?”
Sister tried to fight back tears, but it was no use.
“Mama said”—Sister took a deep breath—“that she’s having a hard time ‘following through.’ She said that she gets started on something—like cooking breakfast or balancing her checkbook or maybe just asking a question—and she can’t remember how to finish. She can’t follow through.”
There was nothing else to say, really. So we just stood there, Sister and me, crying the saddest, quietest tears as Christmas carols played over the kitchen speaker.
Granted, no one had officially diagnosed what was going on with Mama, but in that moment, both of us knew.
Somehow, on some level, we knew.
It was a dreary January day when I drove to my hometown to take Mama to her doctor’s appointment. I arrived at Mama and Daddy’s house late that Thursday morning, and the first thing I noticed was that Mama was rattled. She hadn’t put on her makeup, she wasn’t dressed to the nines (as is her typical preference), and she couldn’t find the earrings she wanted to wear. I tried to lighten the mood by reminding her that we were just going to the doctor’s office, so she didn’t need to be bejeweled and bedazzled, but Mama wasn’t amused. She was annoyed, honestly, and my steady stream of lighthearted chitchat wasn’t helping matters. I made a mental note to ZIP IT, grabbed Mama’s fire engine-red purse, and helped her out to the car.
We made it to her appointment on time, and after a couple of hours of evaluation, the doctor decided that Mama needed to be hospitalized. There were some numbers and some vitals and some whathaveyous that gave the doctor pause, and she wanted to run a few tests to try to pinpoint what was going on. Mama was also in need of some significant medication tweaks, and the hospital was the best place to do that what with the abundance of trained medical personnel.
(Unsolicited Public Service Announcement: when people get older and they see a lot of doctors, everybody might not know what everyone else is prescribing, not to mention that some older patients might get dosages mixed up. Those mixed-up dosages can result in a medical condition that I have come to refer to as DANGER, WILL ROBINSON, DANGER.)
(Seriously, adult children of elderly parents. We have to make our parents’ medications our business.)
(Also: I’m glad we had this talk.)
Mama was none too pleased about going in the hospital, but I kept reminding her that she was going to get some rest, she was going to get her blood pressure down from OH, DEAR GUSSIE levels, and she might even get a definitive answer about why, in her words, “I can’t talk anymore.”
After I filled out the 429 forms required for admission (thanks, America!), an orderly took us to Mama’s hospital room. It was essentially a shoebox with one corner cut out for the restroom, and while I didn’t have an official thermostat anywhere on my person, my best educated guess—primarily based on the heat blast that singed my eyebrows when we first opened the door—was that the cozy shoebox’s temperature was roughly 85 degrees.
Okay. Maybe that’s an exaggeration. It was probably 82 degrees. Clearly I should have taken a wool coat.
Mama spent most of Thursday afternoon and Friday morning being wheeled away for different tests and scans; her doctor wanted the specialists who were on call to have all the information they needed. But even with all those tests going on, Mama made incredible progress within the first forty-eight hours: her blood pressure came down, her hydration levels went up, and her dosages were adjusted so that her medications would work better together. She was more alert, more rested, and much more like her old self.
But we still didn’t have a diagnosis.
Saturday morning Daddy and I were sitting with Mama when the neurologist stopped by. Mama was eating breakfast, trying to coax some flavor out of the hospital grits, so she wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to what the doctor was saying. I looked sideways at Daddy when the neurologist mentioned the same condition another doctor had suggested as a possible diagnosis the day before, and because I am a person who requires significant overexplaining, I wanted to ask him about it. I asked if I could talk to him in the hall.
Mama was still giving those grits her full attention when the doctor and I walked out of the room.
“So,” I began, “I’m just curious if I heard you correctly a few minutes ago. You were talking about Mama’s test results—did I hear you say that she has dementia?”
“Yes. I did say that,” he answered.
“Because Dr. H mentioned it yesterday, but I wasn’t sure if it was the final diagnosis, or if there was something else . . .”
“No, it’s dementia,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Mild to moderate. We can tell based on the brain scan.”
I should have been ready with eight or nine deeply thoughtful follow-up questions. But I was trying to process what I was hearing, trying to make it sink in my head and my heart, and I could only think of one more thing to ask.
“So. She doesn’t need to drive, does she?”
“Um, no.” He laughed the tiniest bit. “Definitely not. No driving. But we’ll start her on some medicine that will slow the progression of the disease, and really, given her age, this isn’t an unusual condition.”
So that was it.
On one hand, it was heartbreaking news. It was both what we had suspected and also what we had feared.
On the other hand, though, it was an answer. It explained so much: the withdrawal, the speech problems, the trouble “following through.” It was almost like finding the missing pieces to the puzzle of the past few years. And even though I absolutely, one hundred percent bawled my eyes out when I took a break from hospital duty to take a shower at Mama and Daddy’s house—even though I would cry right now if we were talking about this in person—I felt so grateful for that answer.
Finally, we knew.
We really knew.
And since we knew, we could deal with it.
So Daddy and I talked, and he was as sweet as he could be, and I may have repeated the part about MAMA CAN’T DRIVE at least four times. We spent the rest of the afternoon hanging out in that glorified closet, Daddy and I both fully aware that the road ahead was going to look very different than the road behind us. But I’ll tell you this (and really, I can only tell you this because I’m typing; if we were talking, I’d never get past some impressively prolific sobbing): the way my daddy responded to Mama and her diagnosis is something I believe will ripple in our family for generations. No kidding. Every time I thought of a new way their lives were going to change, Daddy had it covered. He would do the cooking, he said. He could dust and run the vacuum. He could change the sheets, he said, and he didn’t mind taking Mama to her hair and nail appointments, either. He’d do the grocery shopping, no problem. He’d manage her medication. We’ll handle it just fine, he said.
(And now that a year has passed? I can say without hesitation that he has done every bit of that—and so much more. He takes the best care of his bride of sixty-two years, and I can’t talk about it anymore or I’ll have to get in the bed and will never finish writing this book.)
(I’m sure you understand.)
So Saturday, it wasn’t necessarily the happiest day. But Saturday night, I looked over at Mama and realized that her eyes were sparkling again. She wanted to sit up, she wanted to watch TV, she wanted to laugh, and she wanted to FIX HER HAIR, glory to God. So I washed her hair, got her back in the bed, set up her gigantic magnifying mirror, and handed her a bag full of Velcro rollers. Mama didn’t do much talking, but she smiled. Oh, did she ever smile. I even snapped a picture of her as she rolled her hair; she looked like she was forty years old and getting ready to go somewhere fun with Daddy. It was like someone had taken all the internal uncertainty and worry and confusion of the last three or four years and lifted it right off of her.
I remember thinking that she looked like someone who had been seen.
Really, truly, deeply seen.
And the reason I know what that feels like?
She taught me.
I’m pretty sure that if Mama was having a really good day with her words and you asked her what she taught her children—especially what she has passed on to her girls—she’d say, “Oh, just a few practical things. Probably not all that much.” And if you asked her if she tried to follow Lois’s and Eunice’s lead in terms of passing on “sincere faith,” she’d say that she did her best, but she certainly wouldn’t dream of comparing herself to women in, you know, the Bible.
I would beg to differ.
Mama taught us that the first will be last, and the last will be first. She taught us to trust the Lord in every circumstance, to remember “all things work for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28).
She taught us to go ahead and spend the extra dollar to buy Land-O-Lakes butter, to always make sure pound cake ingredients are at room temperature, and to fry okra in small batches so that the corn meal doesn’t clump.
She taught us that people are made in the image of God; therefore, they are precious—each and every one. She taught us to listen to that “still, small voice,” and that if someone keeps coming to mind and you have no idea why, you’d probably do well to stop and pray for that person. She taught us to worship.
She taught us how to do a lot with a little, how to make a pot of coffee, and how to set a killer table. She taught us the secret to Mamaw’s cornbread dressing recipe, the wonder of a sweet potato casserole, and the blessing of a fresh tomato. She taught us that a good meal brings people together, but a bad meal makes everybody sort of ornery.
She taught us to make good meals.
She taught us how to welcome, how to love, how to comfort, and how to care. She taught us to get the log out of our own eye, to forgive, and to move on. She taught us that love covers a multitude of hurts, and sometimes, when you don’t necessarily feel very loving, sticking with someone out of pure stubbornness will do just fine.
She taught us that the Lord cares about the smallest details of our lives, that we can and should talk to Him about anything, and that we can trust Him no matter what.
We can trust Him.
No matter what.
So now, in this bittersweet phase of our family’s life, when the tables have turned and our sweet mama needs us more than ever, I think I can speak for Sister and Brother when I say this:
We have all the time in the world for her.
As much as she needs. As much as it takes.
She’s the one who taught us that, you know.
And she still has so much to teach us.
That’s a very good thing.
Because we still have so much to learn.