08/04/2026
Certainly worth a read - Brenda Gant’s son-in-law for those who follow her or do not know Shepherding Outdoors. I cried big tears ~ Keisha
Hannah found this while we were looking through old photos.
This is the day I graduated from law school. At first glance, it seemed like such a long time ago…. And true enough, twenty-six years is a long time until you hold it in your hand.
When Hannah handed me the photograph, for a long while I couldn’t decide whether I was looking at two people… or four. Yes, that’s me and my mother… but the young man standing there in a doctoral robe with a diploma tucked beneath his arm is someone I recognize mostly by memory now. And the beautiful blonde woman standing beside him, proud without needing to say so, carrying herself with the quiet confidence that a only a woman who made her way in a man’s world could possess, is surely a lady I loved with every ounce of my being… yet neither of those people exists quite the way they once did. That is my mother and I… but I am not that boy and she is no longer that woman.
Time has a way of introducing strangers to us through familiar faces, and nowhere has that truth become more painful than in the slow, relentless journey my mother has taken through her slow and steady retreat into dementia. For, although she is still here, at eighty-four years old, and still capable of smiling in ways that make you think everything is fine… I find myself grieving because through her smile I know the reality. Though she has not yet left this earth and her body remains, there are only pieces of the woman I knew that still remain. The rest… it has slipped away like falling autumn leaves carried down the cold currents of a mountain stream… one memory at a time.
When this photograph was taken, I thought the story being told was mine. I thought the diploma mattered and I was so proud of the years of studying… the long nights and sacrifices… this was my comeuppance. And who better to stand by my side with gusto than the woman who taught me the meaning of “true grit”? That day, I thought it was about me…
I suppose she might have too. Standing beside me , smiling not because she had accomplished something herself, but because she was proud of her youngest son. I had “made something” of myself… I suppose. But maybe she smiled too because she knew deep down inside that she was the driving force… the one who bought me my first journal notebook, the one who yelled and fussed when she caught me skipping school, the one who agonized over my rebelliously bad decisions. Maybe she smiled out of relief that I had finally made it… despite my own best efforts to destroy my own potential.
And boy I thought I was something back then. How little did I really know though…
I had no idea then that the greatest lesson from that day would not come from the degree folded beneath my arm but from the woman standing beside me, because I assumed, as sons often do, that she would always be exactly as she was that afternoon.
I thought she’d always be Superwoman.
Strong and assuring… driving and demanding. The one who knew the answers. The one whose presence somehow made the world feel conquerable.
It never occurred to me that one day I would become the one who smiled to her and assured her that everything would be ‘okay’ even when I knew I didn’t truly know. Nor did I ever dream that the boy and woman in the picture would one day be a man and a little girl… neither of whom knew what the morrow held.
Dementia does not arrive like a storm announcing itself with thunder and dark clouds rolling over the horizon. It comes more like evening, almost unnoticed at first, stealing the light so gradually that by the time you realize darkness has settled in, you cannot remember precisely when daylight disappeared. First there are forgotten appointments, then repeated stories, then names that should never be forgotten, until eventually even the people who occupied her heart for an entire lifetime begin to feel unfamiliar. There is something profoundly cruel about watching someone lose not only their memories but also the confidence that those memories once gave them, because confusion breeds fear, and that fear settles over them. And there is nothing you can do to make it better…
A few weeks ago I climbed onto the bed beside my mother because she was trembling, frightened by something she could not explain. Looking at me with eyes that searched my face the way a lost traveler studies an unfamiliar map, hoping to find something recognizable before panic takes hold. For several moments she did not know who I was, and there are simply no words that can prepare a son for that kind of silence. You realize very quickly that introducing yourself to the woman who introduced you to the world is among the saddest… and hardest… conversations you will ever have.
I waited. I laid beside her and spoke softly, reminding her of things without insisting she remember them. I asked. “Can I hold your hand” because touch sometimes reaches places that words cannot. Hannah offered words of assurance to her as well… and little by little the fear began to leave her face. Her breathing slowed. Her shoulders relaxed. She squeezed my hand with a strength that surprised me, looked into my eyes, and quietly told me she loved me.
She did not know exactly who I was. But she had not yet forgotten that she loves me.
Somehow she knew I belonged to her.
There are mysteries in this world that medicine can describe but never fully explain, and perhaps love is the greatest of them all. Even after her memory long ago surrendered so much of its treasures, love refused to let go. It still survives beneath the wreckage and lingers long after names and places and dates have disappeared into whatever hidden places dementia carries them. That afternoon I realized that while my mother’s mind had forgotten many things, her heart still remembered how to love, and at least for a moment… that she loved me… and I loved her. … and perhaps that is the deepest part of who we really are.
As I looked again at this old photograph, another realization settled over me, one that somehow had escaped me for all these years. I always believed my mother was raising me to become the man I would eventually be. True too, but that wasn’t all she was doing. Without either of us knowing it, she was also giving me everything she herself would one day lose. Every lesson about toughness, every insistence on perseverance when quitting would have been easier… every business lesson and example of charm, every sacrifice she made with announcing it- every thing she gave me was intentional— we just didn’t understand the return on the investment.
You see… my mother was a business woman. And much of her life was transactional. She invested in me expecting that one day, a return would come. Little did we understand all those years ago, that she was transferring all of those things about herself into my life because one day she would no longer be able to carry them for her own.
What I possess today is, in so many ways, an inheritance that dementia can’t touch. It might steal her memories but it can’t steal what she planted in me.
The woman in this photograph still lives, not because time has been kind enough to preserve her exactly as she was, but because the best parts of her escaped before the disease ever arrived. Those parts of her found refuge in the lives of her children and grandchildren. They settled into the habits she modeled, the values she refused to compromise, the toughness she demonstrated without ever needing to preach about it. Dementia may have taken away her ability to remember teaching those lessons, but it has no authority over the lessons themselves.
They are still here, alive in the people she shaped.
As I watched my own children grow, I’ve wondered whether I was say enough, teach enough, lead enough… have enough Ted Talks, as they like to say. I’ve never really considered that perhaps the greatest gifts I might leave them though, are not the speeches I offer but the life I quietly live in front of them every ordinary day. Children become fluent in the language of example long before they understand the language of instruction. They borrow our best… and our worst, often without either generation noticing the exchange taking place.
Looking at this picture now, I no longer see a young lawyer celebrating his future. I see a mother quietly handing her son the parts of herself that would someday be beyond her reach, trusting without ever knowing why that he would carry them when she no longer could.
And I pray that somewhere, without even realizing it, I have been doing the same for my own children, because there may come a day when they look at an old photograph of me and wonder where that younger man went. I hope that when they do, they discover what I have only recently begun to understand—that the people we love most never truly disappear if we have been paying attention all along, because the finest parts of them were never meant to remain inside them forever. They were always meant to become part of us.
God bless.
