When Writing Pulled Up a Chair

By Kathryn M. Bowman Johnson

Before my mother took ill, I was a morning person. I’d wake before sunrise to brew coffee and scribble into a notebook while the world slept. There was peace in that ritual, the warm hum of the pot, the whisper of a pen on paper.

But as my mother’s health declined, those mornings vanished. For six years, I woke and slept around meals, blood pressure readings, pill charts, and cleaning up accidents. Caregiving became the center, the rhythm, the reason.

My ...