By Rosanne Skirble
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, January 14, 2008

I read to my mom every night on the phone. She is 89 years old. She forgets a lot. She has macular degeneration and can no longer do the daily crossword puzzles. These losses are painful to watch.

What she can do is listen, and she can hear better through the telephone receiver. We live in different cities and spend a lot of time on the phone together. Sometimes our conversations go round and round over the same aches and pains. That's when I break in and say, "Let's read!"

My mother loves to read. She is the kind of person who reads newsprint with a pair of scissors. Until last year, she clipped from whatever came her way -- from local newspapers, national magazines, college newsletters and trade publications, from temple bulletins, book reviews, class schedules and catalogues. She keeps large manila envelopes under her desk with names written on them so she can stuff them with clippings and send them to family or deserving friends.

We begin our reading odyssey during a brief hospitalization, with "The History of Love," a novel by Nicole Krauss. During the weeks when I call her room, my mother answers the phone and bleeds stress. "Let's read," I suggest, and feel her anxiety melt away with the words. The story gives us a healthy place to go, away from the daily sick routine. The book becomes a daily anchor to reality and an oasis for our conversation.

"The words wash over me," she says as we trudge on despite multiple intersecting narrators and a meandering plot. As we read I litter the book with tiny yellow sticky notes, marking my own thoughts and hers.

Reading about how the teenage protagonist mourns her father's death by wearing his sweater every day, I reflect on the death of my own father when I was 5. Fifty-some years later I tell my mother that, as a little girl, I would look at his framed picture on my desk and cry, not so much because he had died but because I couldn't remember anything about him.

Other passages prompt golden nuggets from her past. One day she tells me her childhood address, down to the street number: "I lived in a red-brick row house at 4546 North 12th Street, next to Rabbi Mortimer Cohen." We talk about her father, Harry, a buttonmaker, who died before I was born. He also made belts to match the fabric on women's dresses, which was the style at the time, she tells me.

I remind her about a dress that hung in her closet for 60 years, a World War II voluntary nurse's uniform that she donated to the Pittsburgh Historical Society when she moved into her assisted-living apartment a few years ago.

We read on.

Listening strengthens the brain, says Gene D. Cohen, director of the Center on Aging, Health and Humanities at George Washington University. In his book, "The Mature Mind," Cohen writes: "The types of leisure activities you pursue affect your brain fitness. A [2003 New England Journal of Medicine] study of the connection between leisure activities and the risk of dementia and cognitive decline found regular dancing, board games, playing a musical instrument, doing crossword puzzles and reading as the most effective."

Cohen, who is a personal friend, tells me: "You could make the case that if somebody is listening to a book, they have to work a little harder to concentrate on what they are hearing. You have to think about what is read, but also about the context of what was read before that."

Like a teacher, I quiz my mother on plot. I figure that if she gets the right answers, our reading must be good for her. But peppering her with questions turns out not to be the best strategy. She does not have to be reminded that she has memory loss. We should be having fun.

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.