The bad times started with Mom’s shoes. Not for Mom, but for me. It was the second morning in a row that she had put her shoes on the wrong feet, and it made me really angry.

I retreated to my room, cursed and cried and yelled at my “psychiatrist”—a print of Christ with eyes that follow you around the room, handed down by my great-great-grandmother. But advice wasn’t forthcoming. The psychiatrist only listens.

Mom came down with rheumatic fever when she was 6. In 1920, the doctor called it “growing pains,” a common diagnosis at the time since it affected the arm and leg joints. The fever is caused by strep throat, and because she didn’t have antibiotics, it caused her to suffer from rheumatic heart disease and epilepsy throughout her life.

Her seizures, which she called “spells” and the doctors called “fits,” were always a mystery to me. I didn’t discover until high school they called it epilepsy. She lost her driver’s license after she had a seizure crossing the old Main Street bridge to the Redlands and ran into the railing.

Mom’s life was about responding to how these illnesses restricted her. If she could not drive, she walked. She would hitch a ride to town with a neighbor and walk wherever she needed to go. If she could not keep a job because of seizures, she applied for more and invented some of her own, gratefully keeping books for Father Bertrand at St. Joseph’s Parish and for two brothers who each owned a small business.

Through all of this, as well as a husband who drank and wasn’t dependable, she never seemed afraid.

Mom had a massive stroke at age 50. She relearned how to walk, talk, type and calculate. In 1966, she needed open heart surgery. There was no insurance that would cover her, nor was there Medicaid at the time. Her surgery was performed in Denver.

Mom bounced back from whatever struck her down. She once slipped on ice and hobbled around the St. Vincent DePaul store where she volunteered until I picked her up after work and took her to the hospital, where we discovered she had a broken pelvis. She spent a few weeks in a walker, then she was good as new, walking wherever she needed to go.

Mom always rallied, and it was easy to take that strength for granted. If I had to start putting on her shoes for her, what then?

Here I was taking care of her, working part-time and using up my savings because I didn’t want to put her in a nursing home. She had problems with dementia, she could no longer walk without a walker and she could barely talk.

But the shoes. The shoes were the moment things declined. They meant I had to begin bathing and dressing her. They made me angry because they meant she was dying, however slowly. I had become her legs and mind.

Mom died in 1995. I still grumble at my psychiatrist