Reading to Mom: It Speaks Volumes

Cohen mentions the time he showed an elderly patient a picture of John and Jacqueline Kennedy. The woman smiled in recognition and responded, "That's me and my husband!" He didn't tell the woman, "Oh, no, you're wrong," but instead asked her to tell him about her marriage. After considering her answer, Cohen says he told her, "I can understand why JFK and Jackie reminded you of your husband and you."

My mother and I spend three months reading "The History of Love" and then switch to magazine articles. We read about a hunter-gatherer tribe in a remote region of the Amazon, about a mysterious 2,000-year-old time mechanism, and profiles on Barack Obama, Richard Branson and Microsoft's Gordon Bell. Sometimes when I'm visiting her, we'll read the newspaper, which is what my Silver Spring YMCA exercise buddy Chess Campbell says she did until her mother died last year at age 105.

"Mama Beth subscribed to her hometown newspaper, the twice-weekly Farmville Herald, which reported social news, church schedules, criminal incidents and dead animal sightings," Campbell wrote in an e-mail. "Perhaps all this seems rather mundane, but the truth is my reading to mother from this Prince Edward County newspaper provided us many surprising and pleasurable moments and mother/daughter connection."

The telephone has been central to the work Sara Peller does as associate executive director of programs for seniors for Dorot, a New York-based nonprofit that offers a slew of phone courses for the elderly. Peller says the courses, which began 17 years ago, work because they are interactive, social and geared toward people's interests. Reading over the phone operates on the same principles: "You and your mother are both interested in literature, and so your conversation is elevated from the mundane. You are also acknowledging that your mother is an intelligent, viable person with the same interests that you have," she says.

Gene Cohen advises me to enjoy the pleasure of the moment, the quality of the time my mother and I spend together. Even when memory fades, he says, "you still have imagination." Reflecting on his own mother, he says, "The day after her 90th birthday I asked her how she liked her party, and she told me, 'I don't remember it at all, but I heard that I had a good time.' "

My mother's mind, too, is giving way to her imagination. After a fall she had surgery to repair a broken leg. The anesthesia triggered confusion and deliriums that doctors hope will fade with time. But I don't know if they will, or if she will walk again or return to her home and friends.

Sitting by her hospital bed, I put these thoughts aside. "Mom, let's read," I say, and open the cover of a new book. She smiles and I begin.