Does one honor or diminish an elderly parent by insisting on the truth? A reflection by Davida Pines

Kristin Graziano’s “Contents Have Shifted” considers how best to respond to a parent’s dementia-inflected reality. “For years,” Graziano observes about her mother, “I felt compelled to refute her falsehoods. I felt that by correcting her, I could yank her back to The Truth, to the real world. When I did this, sharp words with resentful tones followed, leaving us both frustrated and silent.”

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On Work-Worn Hands and Gestures of Love, a short essay by poet and educator, Joan Baranow

A writer and poet honors the memory of her mother by finding the parallels between her own work and the story of another mother and daughter.

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Secrets We Keep: Gaining a Perspective on Love by Kim Drew Wright

“A Mother’s Life” is part of a linked short story collection I’m working on. The collection involves how we often lose our true selves but always come back to our essential essence in the end and how often we hide parts of ourselves from those people closest to us.

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