I’m sitting in the Alzheimer’s unit of an assisted living facility. A singer, an apparently good-hearted man, is donating his time to entertain the residents. My mother is nodding her head to the music. She looks happy.

That was Christmas, 2006. I’m sitting with Mom now, a year later. She still looks happy, at least some of the time, but she no longer nods her head to the music.

I wrote that first paragraph as the lead for my weekly newspaper column. My topic was how to use everyday on-the-job writing to create goodwill. The second paragraph reads:

As these thoughts run through my head, I notice a woman swaying in her chair to the music. Her hair is between bright orange and very bright orange.

The same orange-haired woman, Neva, is sitting in the dining room with Mom and me now. It’s a bright, cheerful room, with big windows, a tile floor, and white walls. There are only a few other people here with us. Most of the residents have finished their lunches and returned to their rooms or have moved – or have been moved – to the central gathering area. The three of us are sitting by my laptop computer looking at a slide show I put together for my daughter’s wedding last August, a wedding Mom was unable to attend. The photos are of Kate and Markus growing up and then the two of them as a couple. As each photo appears on the screen, I say their names, hoping Mom will remember or react or say something, but she sits silently.

Neva, however, chats away.

“How old are you?” she asks.

“I’m fifty-eight,” I say.

“How old is your mother?”

“She’s eighty.”

“No, I’m not,” Mom says with a hint of a smile. “I’m one hundred.”

I think she’s teasing, but I’m not sure.

“How old are you, Mom?” I ask.

“I’m one hundred.”

She’s not one hundred, but she looks older than eighty. Her cheeks are swollen, maybe in reaction to her medications, and when she looks at me she tilts her head back slightly and her eyes peer at me over her big round cheeks. The brown mole next to her left eyebrow has enlarged and flattened since I last visited her and it has a rough crust on it, but the two lines extending delicately from her nose to the corners of her mouth accentuate the beauty she has always possessed. Like her own mother, my mother is a beautiful woman. Her hair is matted down on one side because it frightens her when the attendants wash it so sometimes they let it go a few extra days. But even with her crusted mole and her matted gray hair, my mother is a beautiful woman.

“I’m eighty-nine,” Neva says.

Neva is animated, social, quick to laugh. She seems mentally sharp, and she looks younger than Mom.

“Do I have Aldzheimer’s?” she asks Mindy, a young attendant who has come over to see the family photos. Neva pronounces it “Aldzheimer’s” with a “d.”

I like Mindy. She’s competent, she’s sweet, she has a relaxed, low-key manner that puts you at ease, and she obviously cares about the residents.

“No, Honey,” she says. “You have Some-timers.”

“It’s true,” says Neva, throwing back her head and laughing. She leans closer to me. As though guessing the question in my mind, she says, “The reason I’m in here is that I kept locking my son-in-law out of the house. I liked having the house to myself and I kept locking him out and that was causing problems.” She laughs again.

Mom’s decline from living independently to needing constant care transpired in just three years. In retrospect, I can identify signs of dementia that manifested themselves long ago, but her decline was precipitous. During those three years I made numerous trips from Minneapolis to Cincinnati to visit her as she went from an independent person who could drive to a worrisome mother who could not be trusted with a stove, to a distraught woman wandering the hallway crying, “Where’s my baby? Where’s my baby?” At each new stage my brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, and cousins helped to get her established at a higher level of care, and at each stage I imagined her enjoying many years of happy, satisfying life before needing more assistance. As it turned out, my wishes were optimistic and naive.

“How old are you?” Neva asks me.

“I’m fifty-eight,” I say.

“How old is your mother?”

“She’s eighty.”

“No, I’m not,” Mom says. “I’m one hundred.”

“Who’s that?” Neva asks, pointing to a picture of my children.

“That’s my daughter, Kate, and that’s my son, Eddy,” I say.

“Oh, is that Eddy and Kate?” Mindy says. “Your mother always talks about Eddy and Kate. Now I know who they are.”

It feels good to hear Mindy say that. Mom has always adored our two children, has always adored all ten of her grandchildren. I make a mental note to tell my wife, Debbie. As I get older, I’m becoming more forgetful.

The next photo is of my daughter, Kate. She’s radiant with beauty. It’s a glamour shot she uses to promote her business as a ballroom dance instructor and a Pilates instructor. It was Kate who taught ballroom dancing to Debbie and me a few years ago, something we had always wanted to learn. To have our grown daughter teach us was a treat only a parent can appreciate.

“Who’s that?” Neva asks.

“That’s my daughter, Kate,” I say.

“How old is she?” she asks.

“She’s twenty-seven.”

On one of my visits to Cincinnati I drove Mom around to look at assisted living facilities. We both liked the one she selected. She liked that it was not only in her neighborhood but literally across the road and within sight of the apartment buildings where she had lived for eighteen years, ever since she and Dad had divorced. On a later visit I toured the secure unit in that same facility. “Avalon,” it’s called, a nice-sounding name – Avalon, as in the legendary island somewhere in the British Isles where King Arthur was taken to die after a battle, a place famous for its apples. It was on that visit that I peeked into the dining room where we’re sitting now and first saw Neva, her orange hair standing out like an improbable flower in a field of gray and white. She was helping set the tables for lunch, and I mistook her for a volunteer.

I’m enjoying her company today. Her energy and light-heartedness lift my spirits.

“I wrote about you in my newspaper column,” I tell her.

“You did?” Neva says, her eyes opening wide. “Nobody has ever written about me in the newspaper before.”

“Well, I did. I have the column on my computer. Here, I’ll show it to you.”

Mom doesn’t seem to mind the interruption. I bring up the column on my screen and I begin reading it aloud. When I read the sentence about her orange hair, Neva asks, “Does my hair look orange?” She seems surprised. Before I can answer, she says, “I guess it does look orange.”

“Well . . . yes.” I say. “It does look orange.”

When I was five or six years old, Mom accidentally dyed her hair orange. I don’t know what color she wanted it to be, but something went wrong and it turned orange. As I remember it, it wasn’t as brilliant orange as Neva’s – it was a somewhat darker orange, more of a burnt orange – but it was definitely, undeniably orange. When my two brothers and I saw it, we ran outside and rounded up our neighborhood friends and told them we would let them come inside to see our mother’s orange hair if each of them gave us a nickel. At first no one would pay because no one believed our mother’s hair was really orange, so we let one boy in free. After that, the other boys either paid up or promised to pay later. Years later we told her what we had done. Mom suffered from depression, both at the time of the episode and for decades afterward, but when we told her, she laughed. It really was funny. Our orange-haired mother was quite a spectacle. None of our friends had ever seen anything like it.

“Does my hair look orange?” Neva asks me again.

“Yes,” I say. “Your hair looks orange.”

“It’s not orange,” she says. “It’s Audacious Red. I dyed it that color because it was getting shitty gray and I wanted something bold, so I dyed it Audacious Red.”

“What did you say?”

“I said my hair was getting shitty gray.”

“That’s what I thought you said,” I say, and we both laugh. I suspect she uses that line often. Mom is gazing at me, her head tilted back, her lips curled slightly. The look on her face is happy, serene.

“I love you so much,” she says.

“Oh, Mom,” I say, “I love you.”

“I want this to last forever,” she says.

“Me, too, Mom. I want this to last forever, too.”

I wish I had taken a picture of her the day we moved her from her apartment to her assisted living facility. I had helped her finish packing the day before, and when I left I told her I would pick her up at eight-thirty in the morning. She met me at her door in her white hat, her favorite purple-flowered dress, and neatly applied red lipstick. She smiled brightly, as if to announce, “Look, I’m ready, ready to move on to the next stage in my life.” And then in one day a gang of family members and professional movers moved her from one place and re-established her in another. But as the day wore on, and one person after another asked her questions about where she wanted things, she became more flustered, more fatigued, and more confused. By the end of the day, we had re-created a home environment in her new place that looked very much like her old one. As I looked around her new place, I felt proud of our accomplishment, and then I noticed her slumped in a chair, her lipstick gone, the determination drained from her face.

“How old is she?” Neva asks me.

“She’s eighty,” I say.

Neva looks at her skeptically. “She doesn’t look eighty. How old are you?”

“I’m fifty-eight.”

Then she turns back to the computer screen. I resume reading to her:

One thing we can do is take time for people. We can spend time with the people we love – not although we have so little time, but because we have so little time.

As writers, we can use our writing to spread goodwill in the workplace.

I skip the part where I suggest ways to spread goodwill, such as sending good-news messages and attending to the details of coworkers’ lives, and I read the last four paragraphs:

The singer is beginning another song. It’s a foxtrot or a slow swing. On an impulse, I stand up and walk over to the orange-haired woman. Before I can speak, she offers both hands to me, so I try a few easy steps with her, and she follows. Not only does she follow, she’s good, so I try a few turns, and she does them, so I lead crossovers and sweethearts and whatever I can think to lead, and she does everything.

At the end of the song, we thank each other and, laughing, we return to our chairs. An attendant touches my shoulder.

“Neva has been dancing since she was a little girl,” she says. “She was a ballroom dancer.”

As if I didn’t know.

That’s the end of the column. After I finish reading it, Neva sits quietly, but only for a moment. Then she pulls the computer closer and she reads the entire column again out loud. She misses a few words, but mostly she gets them right.

“I also was a tap dancer,” she tells me after she has finished. “I loved to dance. I always loved dancing. It was so much fun. I started tap-dancing when I was six.”

“We’ll have to dance again sometime,” I say. “Please put me on your dance card.”

As I say the words “dance card,” a woman in a wheelchair lifts her head and looks over. She scowls, then slumps forward again.

“When I was nineteen, my boyfriend moved next door to me,” Neva says. “That’s not a good idea. Don’t ever have your boyfriend move next door. My girlfriend lived nearby, and she had a boyfriend, too. We had an attic in our house. Don’t ever have your boyfriend move next door.”

Mom was fifteen, nearly sixteen, when she married Dad. He was eighteen. She never told her five children how young she was when she got married until we were grown, I suspect because she didn’t want to give us any ideas. They were married just before the war. Dad had volunteered to be a pilot in the Army Air Corps and he was on his way overseas to fly a supply plane, a C-47, “over the hump” of India and Burma, and my baby boomer brother wasn’t born until after the war, so that’s not the reason they got married. I know my mother was madly in love with my father, and I know my father loved my mother, but I suspect another reason they married so young was that Mom wanted to get away from her family. One time, for no reason, her stepfather reached across the breakfast table and slapped her face. Another time he told her to go down to the corner store for something, but it was dark and she said she was afraid. “Don’t worry,” he said. “When they see how ugly you are, they won’t bother you.” The last time he raised his hand to her, she was a young teenager. She ran outside, and he followed her, and she stood on the sidewalk and said, “You are never going to hit me again,” and he pulled off his belt and started walking toward her, and she backed away and said, “You are never going to hit me again,” and he kept coming toward her, and then she said it a third time, and he stopped and turned around and walked back into the house. He never hit her again. And after she was married, he never said another mean thing to her.

Now, here’s the odd thing. I loved my grandfather, my Paw Paw. I loved him dearly. I don’t know if Mom loved him, but I know Dad did. Dad cried like a baby at his funeral. My brothers and sisters and I all loved him. He was never overly affectionate with us in the way our grandmother, our Maw Maw, was, but he was sweet and kind and gentle. The other reason I loved him is Mom never told me how he had mistreated her until I was a grown man in my thirties, long after he had died. It was her gift to me, one of many, I suppose, given without my knowing I had received it. How many other gifts did she give to me without my knowing? I wonder.

“How old are you?” Neva asks.

“I’m fifty-eight,” I say.

“How old is she?” she asks.

“She’s eighty.”

“She doesn’t look eighty.”

“I know.”

“I’m eighty-nine. I’ll be ninety in June. Who’s that?”

“That’s my daughter, Kate,” I say.

“How old is she?” she asks.

“She’s twenty-seven.”

“Who’s that?” she asks, pointing to the next photo.

“That’s me.”

“That’s you? With a mustache? You look a lot older. You looked better with a mustache. You look a lot older now.”

“Yes, I do look older,” I say. “I am older.”

“Who’s that?” she asks.

“That’s trouble,” I say.

“That’s trouble?”

“That’s my wife, Debbie. She’s trouble.”

“She’s trouble?”

“Yes, she’s trouble,” I say. “She has personality, and lots of it. She’s very special to me, and I love her very much. Her mother was trouble, too, and I loved her very much also.”

“I’m trouble,” Neva says. “Who’s that?”

“That’s my daughter, Kate,” I say.

“How old is she?” she asks.

“She’s twenty-seven.”

I hear a little kissing sound. I’m leaning to the left, toward Mom and Neva, so that I can see the computer screen. My cheek is near Mom’s lips, and she’s making little kissing sounds. She’s smiling impishly. I move my cheek to her lips, and she gives me a sweet little kiss, the kind of kiss a little girl would give.

“Oh, thank you!” I say, and I kiss her cheek. “I love you, Mom.”

“I want this to last forever,” she says.

“Me, too, Mom. I want this to last forever, too.”

It saddens me to think that never again will Mom call me. Never again will I pick up the phone and hear her say, “Hi, Honey. Do you have time to talk?” I was always pleased to hear her voice, but the last several times she called me, nearly two years ago, she would lose track of time and talk nonstop until finally I would say, “Mom, I love talking with you, but I have to get back to work now” or “I have to finish writing my column” or “I have things I need to do.” No matter how nicely I would say it, it seemed to upset her. She would say, “Oh, I’m sorry. I know how busy you are. I’m sorry,” and I would say, “It’s all right, Mom. I love talking with you, but I have these others things I need to do now.”

The last e-mail she sent to Debbie and me, dated May 15, 2003, included three messages. The first was to Debbie: “Your dinner river cruise on Mother’s Day must have been delightful. I hope the whole day was very special for you. You are a gal that definitely deserves it!” The second message was to me: “I understood about your schedule. No problem. Actually, I had only been home for a very short time, after spending nine hours at King’s Island. I loved every minute of it and didn’t realize that I was tired until I got home. If I had been a little more alert, I would not have talked as much as I did. I was so happy that you called me.” Those were nearly her last written words to me – nearly, but not quite. The third message, addressed to both Debbie and me, thanked us for “the lovely flowers” we had sent for Mother’s Day: “Just the right size arrangement and beautiful small, pink carnations with baby’s breath. I believe they will last for a while longer. I also thank you both for the beautiful card. You made me feel very loved.”

Those were the last words my mother will write to me.

After she could no longer write or call, my sisters would dial the phone and hold it to her ear when they visited her so that we could talk. Even when she didn’t make sense or didn’t understand what I was saying, I loved hearing the familiar cadence and inflections of her voice. At the end of those conversations, she would say, “Thanks for talking with me. I know how busy you are. You’re a busy man.” When I visited her last year, she thanked me for spending time with her and then she said, “I know you’re busy. You’re a busy man.” Will this be how my mother remembers me? I want her to think of me as a loving, if sometimes inattentive, son. But as her memory fades, just before it disappears altogether, will her last thought of me be that I’m a busy man?

“How old are you?” Neva asks.

“I’m fifty-eight.”

“I’m eighty-nine,” she says. “I’m wild. I’m trouble, too. When I asked my mother why I was getting fat, she told me because I was pregnant. ‘What do you mean, I’m pregnant?’ I said to her. ‘The stork hasn’t come.’ ‘You’re pregnant,’ my mother told me. My girlfriend was pregnant, too. I had a boy, and she had a girl. Oh, I was wild.” She laughs. “I was wild. I was trouble then. I’m still trouble.”

When Mom was eight or nine she saw a man in the corner store, and though she hadn’t seen him since she was three years old, she recognized him as her father. “I just knew it was him,” she once told me. She walked up to him and said, “You’re my father, aren’t you? I’m your daughter, Margaret. You’re my father, aren’t you?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he fumbled in his pocket, handed her a nickel, and walked out the door.

What had she wanted? A moment of his time? A kind word? A hug? A father who knelt before her and said, “Yes, I’m your father. I love you, Margaret. I wish I could have shared my life with you”? But that’s not what she got. She got a nickel from a father she never knew, a stepfather who slapped her and told her she was ugly, a mother who was distant from her, a handsome, dashing Army Air Corps pilot who swept her off her feet, and after forty-two years of marriage and decades of illness and depression and five grown children, a divorce.

The next eighteen years, however, were not unhappy ones. In fact, in some ways they were the happiest years of her life. The first year or two after the divorce Mom was angry, but over time her anger left her, her depression subsided, then disappeared, and she created a new life for herself. She became active in her church, she traveled to Hawaii, a place where she and Dad had gone as a couple, she joined Debbie and me on some of our family vacations, she did things with her other children, and – most fulfilling for her – she babysat her two daughters’ four children several times a week, giving her the chance, she once told me, to be the mother she wasn’t able to be for me and my brothers and sisters.

During those eighteen years, she lived in an apartment with a balcony that looked out to a wooded hillside and beyond to the Mill Creek Valley. Although the valley was developed and industrialized, the view was expansive. She never tired of looking at the sky and the clouds, and on sunny days she loved the way the sunshine cascaded through her windows. For those eighteen years she was free. It was the only time in her life, she said to me, when no one told her what to do or who she was supposed to be. I marvel at how someone who was bedridden with depression for most of her adult life could find such peace and happiness in her later years. Her strength and resilience inspire me.

“How old are you?” Neva asks.

“I’m fifty-eight,” I say.

Mom was fifty-nine when she and Dad divorced. I was thirty-seven.

Dad is now with a woman we have grown to love, a wonderful, active, adventurous woman, and they seem very much in love with one another. The one thing I’ve learned about divorce is not to judge a relationship from the outside, even when the relationship is between two people you love, especially when the relationship is between your mother and your father. Every story has at least two versions.

Mom is making her little kissing sounds again. I lean over to receive her gift. Sometimes she talks fluently but incoherently. Sometimes she struggles to express a thought that would probably make sense if only she could find the words. And sometimes she makes perfect sense. But she no longer tells her stories, the ones I know the endings to, and now, increasingly, she speaks only in short sentences. When those sentences make sense, they usually have to do with love. Yesterday, when Debbie and I were visiting and I was talking to her about the trip she and I had taken to England and Scotland seven years ago, all she would say was “Oh, yes, indeed. Yes, indeed. I remember.” But when I mentioned to Debbie that I was tired, not thinking Mom would hear, she looked at me, the cloudiness clearing from her eyes, the years vanishing from her lined face, and she said, “Oh, honey, are you tired?” It’s hard to lose my mother, bit by bit, so that every time I’m with her there’s less of her left. She leaves piece by piece, but even as the doors to her mind close one by one, the door to her heart is propped open.

“Who’s that?” Neva asks.

“That’s my daughter, Kate,” I say. “She’s twenty-seven.”

“She’s twenty-seven?”

“Yes.”

“I’m eighty-nine. I’ll be ninety in June.”

“Well, happy birthday,” I say.

“It’s not my birthday until June,” she says. “How old are you?”

“I’m fifty-eight.”

“I’m wild,” she says. “I’m trouble, too. Before my little brother was born, I asked my mother why she was getting bigger, and she told me she was getting fat because she was eating a lot. And then when my brother was born, she said the stork brought him. That’s what she told me.”

“She never told you where babies came from?”

“She told me the stork brought my little brother. And then when I was nineteen, I had a baby boy. I was wild.” She laughs. “I was trouble then. I’m still trouble.”

The next morning I stop by Avalon to say goodbye. Our plane takes off at one-thirty, and I want to see Mom one more time before we leave for the airport. The code to open the door hasn’t changed over the past year. It’s 5-1-4. As I punch in the numbers, I try to recall the code I’ll need to exit. That code has changed. The other day I couldn’t remember it, but it didn’t matter. One of the attendants called it out to me, apparently unconcerned that any of the residents would remember it long enough to make a break for freedom.

I’m surprised when I see Mom coming down the hallway without her walker. I’m surprised to see her walking unassisted, and I’m surprised to see her wearing pale blue slacks. I’ve never seen my mother in slacks before. Throughout her entire life she has worn dresses. As she walks toward me, she is looking down, her face set with determination. I once visited my grandmother when she was just about the age Mom is now, just before she had to move out of her house to a nursing home. During that visit, Maw Maw stood up abruptly and, without a word, marched down the hallway to her bedroom, turned around, and marched back to where we were sitting. I thought it peculiar at the time, but now I understand. She was showing me she could still walk. As Mom comes toward me now, she holds onto the wooden railing in the hallway and she takes little baby steps, but she’s walking unassisted and without her walker. I’m proud of her.

I greet her with a hug.

“Come on, Mom. I’ll walk with you.” I take her arm.

Partway down the hallway, the woman I noticed yesterday in the dining room is slowly rolling her wheelchair toward us. She’s coming right at us. Scowling, she talks rapidly, nonstop, in a low, raspy voice. I catch a few words, but they don’t make sense. I move Mom aside, and we let her pass.

“Mom, would you like to sit with everyone?” I ask.

“Yes, indeed,” she says. “Yes, indeed.”

When we reach the room where people gather, I help her sit down. It frightens her to sit backward until she knows for certain there’s a chair behind her, so I place one of her hands on the arm of the chair.

“There, Mom, you can sit back now.”

The scowling woman in the wheelchair appears around the corner. As she comes near, she turns toward me, her face a wrinkled roadmap, and says in her low, raspy voice, “You never asked me to dance.”

It takes a moment for me to comprehend what she has said.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“Agnes,” she says without hesitation.

“Agnes,” I say, “I’ll dance with you the next time I come to visit,” but she rolls on by, muttering something about a car.

When I turn to Mom, she’s looking at me intently. I take her hands in mine and hold them tight. She looks at me for a long time without speaking.

“You are so beautiful,” she says finally. She says it as though she is looking at a newborn baby and can’t quite comprehend the miracle. “You are so beautiful,” she says again.

“I love you, Mom.” I want to tell her I’ll miss her, but I don’t. I don’t want to cry with all these people around, even if no one would notice. I take a deep breath to control my voice. Then I say, “It’s hard to say goodbye.”

She tilts her head back slightly, her lips curled in a slight smile. She has that happy, serene look on her face. She looks at me for a long time, for what seems like a lifetime, gazing at me over her round cheeks as though I’m a work of art.