I didn’t realize I would lose my mom in slow motion.
First things first, I’ve only started referring to my mom as “mom” in the past few years. She really would rather I refer to her as “Dagmar” and so, in this post, you will see a lot of that too.
Dagmar has been a wonderful mother to me. I always felt like I had a full seat at the table with her. I had her ear. She would hear me and respect me enough to argue with me. And she would listen and consider the arguments I threw her way. This was not always terribly civil, our language could grow quite harsh, but she was never inclined to punish us for the words we used. To me, she felt like a peer.
Dagmar expressed her love through critique. She would always let you know what she thought. She would sweep into your house and rearrange the furniture. She would pocket books from your bookshelf that she wanted to read. She would ask for more salt in the meal we were cooking. But a warm cuddle? A comforting tea? A favorite desert? Those were not things I expected from my mom.
There is so much more I could say about Dagmar, but for now, I will just say that she was one of the constants of my life. I would seek her out for validation or critique of my own thoughts. She never required that I agree with her, but she always let me know what she thought of the direction I was taking. I could push and pull, I could orient myself in my struggle with her. I believe that creativity is born of constraints, and Dagmar was the original constraint in my life. She helped me make my way by serving as a guiding star in the vastness of opportunities. I wanted to orbit that star, even if that orbit was often full of tension.
I fear that star has faded. Oh, my mom is still here, but she is no longer who she once was and I am getting to know someone new. I am staggering in my orbit.
Last September I took Dagmar to Austria for what might have been her last visit to her birthplace and the country of her youth. It was a difficult trip. Dagmar was in obvious decline, found it hard to walk, had little interest in meeting with old friends, and felt quite vulnerable much of the time.
A month later, back in Ohio, she seems to have suffered a stroke on Thanksgiving. My sister found her unresponsive and it took two days for language to return (German came first) and recognition to calm her anxiety. Since then, she seems to have suffered a few more small strokes.
In May, when she could not recognize my brother in the elevator, we siblings decided that she needed more care than we could provide. We began to work with her on a transition to assisted living, which took place earlier this month, in July 2025. This is never an easy transition for someone, but I think it has been going fairly well for Dagmar, in part due to the great love and care with which my siblings have arranged for the move and all the parts of her old life that she has been able to carry over to her new life.
I live in Minnesota, my mom lives in Ohio, so I don’t see her in person very much. We used to talk once a week or so. But for the past few months we have connected almost every day. We bought Dagmar an Alexa Echo device that we can “drop in” on, so she does not even have to “answer” the phone (answering the phone and replying to texts has become very erratic for her). This daily exposure, often for just a few minutes, has helped me keep up with her good and bad days. But I also didn’t step back to look at where we had arrived until this week.
This week I realized that I had lost the mother I knew. I had lost that constraint. The loving critic. I’m not sure when I lost her. In retrospect, I’m not sure she joined us for the trip to Austria, where I found a much more vulnerable and tired person in her place. She certainly was not here this spring when my mom visited Minnesota and didn’t rearrange a single pillow or steal a single book. The person I could count on for a good argument or an astringent opinion has departed. My orbit wabbles.
In her place I have found a new person who struggles to find words or remember what she intends to do on a given day. I am still getting to know this new Dagmar, to meet her where she is at instead of to try to fit her into the old garb. My conversations with her are quicker, more to-the-point. She is immediately satisfied and ready to end the call once her question has been answered, but then she will probably call with the same question in a few hours again. I try to stay in the present and future tense with my mom now. There is not much point on rubbing her nose in what she forgot (just a few hours ago) or to ask her for analysis with words she struggles to find. But I do have some hope that in the routine of her new home she is discovering a bit of energy and engagement that had fallen by the wayside these past few months.
Sometimes I feel I am meeting the girl who grew to become my mother, though that is a dangerous illusion, I am sure. But I try to be curious. Who is this Dagmar and how does she connect with the Dagmar I have known? How can I make her day just a little bit lighter? Do I dare allow my path to be guided by her?