By Robert Arleigh White
This story is about caring with compassion and honesty. It captures a moment that many families quietly face as parents grow older and children step into caregiving roles. It’s not just about illness or aging. It’s about love expressed in the smallest of ways, and the deep emotional currents that run beneath everyday life. As roles reverse, and children begin to care for the people who once cared for them, confusion, frustration, and grief often rise to the surface. But so does tenderness. In telling this story, the author offers a gentle mirror to others going through the same experience, reminding us that even when memory fades, bodies weaken, or communication falters, love still finds a way through. It’s a story that resonates because it honors the complexity of aging and the quiet, enduring strength of familial love. This story shows us that connection can be rediscovered in the simplest acts.
Do you remember that crazy rain from some summers ago? I was at work one day that June when I got this call from my mom:
“Your father’s gone crazy – he says he doesn’t love me anymore, and he’s gone out of the house, and I don’t know what to do! You’ve got to come over right away!”
“OK! I’m on my way.”
Now, by this time Dad was practically blind, and he’d gone out in this rain? This couldn’t be good. I called back from the car. This time Dad answered.
“How’s everything going?”
“Everything’s fine! You don’t need to come over right now.”
“Too late – I’m on my way!”
When I got there, they were in their respective corners. I asked what happened. It was like listening to two witnesses describe a car wreck: she told me what it looked like from her corner, and he told me what it looked like from his, but it was the same wreck.
I asked Mom to wait in the den while I talked to Dad.
“What’s going on?” I asked
“Nothing much. Everything’s fine.”
I tried again: “What’s going on today?”
He was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “There ere are too many things that are wrong with me that can’t be fixed.”
He was right. He had diabetes and Parkinson’s and that kind of macular degeneration that causes your brain to decipher things that your eyes no longer can. For a while you can reason yourself away from the fake images that make no logical sense. Sooner or later, though, it wears you out, and you just give in.
The harder problem was my mother. She had no patience for this. “Robert, you know there aren’t any of the things you think you see in this house!”
This was wearing her out, too. I don’t think she was angry. She was confused and probably scared.
Dad and I sat together for a long while. This was probably the first time that he had been so vulnerable with me, and I didn’t want to lose this moment. We held hands for a long time before I said,
“Let me talk to Mom.”
“So, what’s going on?”
“Oh, he’s just driving me crazy!”
“What does that mean?”
“He won’t let me do anything!”
“Like what?”
“He won’t let me turn out the lights!”
“What?”
See, Dad went to bed around 8:30. Mom stayed up until 10. Then she would wake him up from a dead sleep and ask,
“Robert, can I turn out the lights?”
“No Mary, I have to do that.”
And he stumbled around the house looking for lights to turn out. I asked her,
“Did you ever think to just turn out the lights and go to bed?”
“Why…no! I didn’t!”
“Let’s go talk to him and see what he says.”
We went back into the living room.
“Dad, Mom has a question she wants to ask you.”
“Robert, I want to know why I can’t turn out the lights!”
It wasn’t a question, but it was a start. Dad was quiet. He looked at her. He looked down, then at me. Then he said,
“Every bite of food I put in my mouth, your mother has to make. Every time I go somewhere, your mother takes me there. Turning the lights out at night is the one thing I can do to show her that she is loved and cared for at home.”
“Mom, what do you think?”
Long pause.
“Well. I guess he can turn out the lights.”
The picture that I have in my head as I remember driving away that afternoon is of the two of them standing under the eaves of the garage. A sheet of rain separated us and put them in a kind of fade.
But I could see them reach to each other with their inside hands while they waved goodbye to me.
