I want to thank everybody for their prayers and kind words after the short note that I posted last Friday.
Mom died on Saturday night. And for those who knew her, the world feels a little colder, and a little emptier.
Regular readers know that she had Alzheimer’s, like her mother before her. The early symptoms showed up around 5 years ago, and over the last several years, the disease made its heartless, relentless progress.
This past August we made the tough decision to put her in a memory care unit in a nursing home just a few miles from Rhonda’s house south of Nashville. The transition was hard on everyone. Even though mom had toured the nursing home twice with Rhonda and had been excited about going there, when the move was made, she was disoriented, and would often cry when we came to visit her.
In the previous months, she hadn’t recognized the home she shared with Rhonda and her husband as hers, and she was similarly lost at the nursing home. After some problems we had with the staff there being less attentive than we’d hoped, we moved her to another nearby memory care unit a week before Christmas.
She had a better couple of weeks there, and made a new friend of a fellow resident, before her condition began to drastically deteriorate. She became combative, and when staff members tried to redirect her, she became violent with them. She was moved to another unit for more intensive treatment, before she took a turn for the worse, failing a swallow test and lapsing into a semi- comatose state.
Rhonda called me on Wednesday, and I drove up to Tennessee. By the time I got to the hospital that night, mom was breathing deeply and rhythmically, but was no longer lucid. We spent most of the next three days at her bedside.
The nurses were very good, and the hospice nurses were amazing. (I had the same experience with dad years ago, when he received hospice care at home – a few miles from mom’s hospital bed – and with my mother-in-law, whom we had in hospice care at our house in Florida for a short time before her passing.)
One nurse told me that hearing was one of the last things to go, and that patients can sometimes hear you talking to them for longer than you might think. So we talked to mom a lot, and told her how loved she was.
We put a Bluetooth speaker beside her, and I played some George Jones for her, which she always loved. However, you never realize how much death and sadness there is in some great country music until you play it for your dying mother. “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” “If Drinkin’ Don’t Kill Me (Her Memory Will),” “The Grand Tour” (about a terrible divorce). Good lord!
So I fairly quickly switched to her other favorite songs: the hymns that we were raised on.
“Blessed Assurance,” “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” “I’ll Fly Away,” “Amazing Grace.” I mixed in some newer ones too. “How Deep the Father’s Love for Us” (the Celtic Worship version is great) and Audrey Assad’s “Even Unto Death.”
I’ve known and loved most of those hymns since childhood. But I learned something new about them this week: a hymn will never preach to you like it does when you’re at the deathbed of the woman who introduced you to it, and who loved Christ every day of her life, and who taught you to love Him too.
Mom’s death seemed to strangely echo dad’s. Dad died in the winter of 2014 on one of the foggiest nights in recent memory, and mom died during a very unusual (for Tennessee) snow and ice storm. If you were writing fiction, the weather symbolism – the disorienting eeriness of thick fog, and the cold isolation of deserted, snowy streets – would come across as ham-handed, and too obvious.
But it seemed fitting in both cases, and reflected our state of mind as we lost such good and loving parents.
And yet Saturday night brought contentment and relief, too. Not just because we knew where mom was going, and Who she was going with. But because over the last several years, we had been dreading what was in store for her, and for us.
Mom’s mom died of Alzheimer’s too, spending her final years in a nursing home before dying at 91. Mom was 87, and she had already lost so much of herself before last night. It broke our hearts to anticipate the slow, pitiless descent that we feared was in front of her. We couldn’t bear to think of what her last years might cost her, and how they might threaten to erase our memories of who she really was.
And now we’ve been spared that, and her suffering is over, and we’ve got so many good memories.
The day after her death, three stand out to me.
First, I’m so grateful that we were able to take her back home to Illinois for a family reunion last August, a week before she went into the nursing home. I wrote about that experience in my column dated 8/8/25, which you can find on this site if you’d like.
Everybody was happy to see her, especially because most of them knew that the visit might be the last time they’d have with her. She really enjoyed the evening, even though the memory began to slip away from her by the time my sister took her back to Tennessee the next day.
As I wrote in the last paragraph of that entry, “When they got home that evening, mom went to bed early, and by the next day she didn’t remember the trip at all. But for that one night, she was in her old hometown and surrounded by family. And when she wakes up from this life and the fog has lifted for good, she’ll remember it all.”
I believe that that happened for her last night.
I’ve also written about a second memory of her in a previous column. This happened around two years ago, after she’d had a minor stroke when she was still living with Rhonda. When she came home she was still unsteady on her feet, and a fall was a real worry. So Rhonda told her that she would sleep in her bed with her for the next few nights, in case she needed help getting up in the night.
Mom was okay with that, but by bedtime she’d forgotten the conversation. So when she turned over in bed shortly after turning off the tv, she was startled to find Rhonda next to her. She reminded mom that she was going to sleep with her tonight, and mom said that that was okay.
After a moment, she said, “Did you have a bad dream?”
Because: you can’t kill a good mother’s maternal instinct.
My third memory is the one captured in the picture of mom and me on this page. It was taken around 5 or 6 years ago, and shows me wearing an idiotic turkey hat, and mom wearing a kid’s birthday hat, and laughing so hard she couldn’t catch her breath.
I can’t remember the exact occasion, except that it wasn’t Thanksgiving, and it wasn’t anybody’s birthday. So…yeah. Your guess is as good as mine. Which probably tells you a lot about the Simpsons.
But that picture captures the essence of mom.
We even have a few good memories of her passage through the disease.
As her memory failed her over the last year, in her wounded mind she returned again and again to a brick house on Post Street in Ottawa, Illinois, where she was living with her parents when she met my dad. From there she moved to the nearby town of Marseilles when she married dad.
Her continual mental return to the Post Street house made sense to us, because she loved her parents and she loved our dad, and that house represented the happy bridge between her time with them and then with dad.
Mom and dad kept their vows to each other, spending the next 56 years together, until dad’s death parted them, just before Christmas in 2014. She’s lived the last 11 years without him, and even though she’s been happy, and enjoyed her life, she also said many times that she was ready to go.
And now she has, and they’re together again.
Rest in peace, mom, and we’ll see you soon.
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Martin Simpson 