Late Night Transmission

January 16, 2026
3:25am
Late Night Transmission

My mother is gone.
She’s not dead. We’re still lucky enough to have her.
Her body is here, in the room with me.
She is breathing. She is talking,
Have mercy, she is talking.
Endlessly talking.
But she’s not here. Alzheimer’s is a waging a battle we can’t see. One she’s fighting by herself even though she is surrounded with love and support.
It’s taking over and we can’t do a thing about it.
We sit quietly and listen.
There are ashtrays in the ceiling. And they’re dropping burning cigarettes onto the floor, the TV, the curtain between her room and the hallway.
She just knows everything is on fire, but no one is doing anything.
She keeps talking about the little girl in the green dress who keeps coming in to stare at her. (It’s just the CNA checking to make sure she’s okay)
About the grippy socks that are strangling her feet.
(They’re not)
She wants me to get the scissors and cut them off of her.
(I took them off. They’re not there. She has her leg straight up in the air to show me the strangling socks. I say, “look – no socks. There are your feet.” She frowns. “Fine. Go ahead and lie to me. I know what I know.”)
This happens over and over and over again.
“It’s normal, the sundowning” the night nurse says.
“It’s anything but,” I think, but I smile and nod.

She keeps calling for my brother.
Who is at home.
Hopefully in bed, sleeping soundly, for the first time in weeks – months.
He has spent that time spiraling into a torrent of anxiety while being the primary care giver.
Doing the best he can in an impossible situation.
Changing diapers.
Cleaning up after episodes of incontinence.
Cleaning up spilled food.
Endless laundry.
Putting barrier cream and powder on sores and rashes.
Picking her up off the floor at the cost of his spine and sanity.

Then she calls for my dad.
Who has been dead since 2013, shattering our world as he laid on the dining room floor, twenty-two days after he retired.
They would have been married 58 years this month.
She doesn’t remember he’s gone.
I sit next to her in the chair and hold her hand and look at her.
I explain what happened.
“Did he die today?” she asks, shaken to her core.
But all information is new information to her.
She doesn’t know where she is.
She thinks she wore her nightgown to work.
Her clarity ebbs and flows. Shifts and shakes.
She remembers she used to go with her father when he would fix people’s TV sets in the 1950s.
And that he used to whistle when we came down the steps.
“You remember that, Carolyn, when he would whistle at us when we came down for church?”
I don’t disagree. It just upsets her when I try to correct her.
So I don’t.
“He was a character,’ I say. Because he was.

She falls asleep for a little while.
I should try to sleep, too, but I can’t.
There’s a tension headache poking around the edges of the messy bun that’s falling down.
I know she’ll be awake in an hour.
The same pattern repeated.
If the woman down the hall who is screaming, weeping, and begging to be allowed to leave doesn’t wake her – that is—

How the hell does she not hear that?

She’s having a conversation with someone in her sleep, now.
Something about a wheel and needing a key.
Spinning around to see what you get.
There’s pointing involved.
A giggle.
Then the telltale snore.
She’s out again.

My mother was a formidable woman.
Sharp as a tack.
Smart as a whip.
Curious.
Interested.
Engaged.
A voracious reader.
A proponent of justice.
The best kind of enthusiastic helper.
She did everyone’s hair and sewed everyone’s costumes.
She opened her house to our friends.
She made endless pancakes and bacon and cinnamon rolls for people who stayed over.
She was game to play beer pong with the college kids who were always invading her house, in her basement, in her pool.
She made the ultimate home and was so proud when people she didn’t give birth to called her “Mama Riley”- which happened a lot.
She was no nonsense.
She pulled no punches.
And, amazingly, had a beautiful knack of realizing that she wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea,
Yet gave precisely zero fucks.
God, she was a real one.
Brilliant.
I hope some day I have the courage to be more like her.

Never in a million years would I have thought it would come to this.
That this would happen to her.
To us.
Then again, no one ever does see it coming.
And if you did, how would you prepare?
There’s no way to ready yourself for this—
This conscious loss.
This gut wrenching feeling of helplessness.

But I’m not helpless.

It’s my job to be her historian now.
To remember who she was and remind her of those things, even if she can’t grasp them.
It’s going to hurt.
It already does.
So much that it feels like the wind is knocked out of me.
But that’s just the love.
And that’s not gone.