All the Ways a Heart Can Break
Do you wanna feel how it feels?
(Press play and I’ll read it to you—like, actually me, not an AI bot.)
I have made the mistake, in recent years, of thinking that I know something. Thinking that I’ve gained some wisdom with my decades, some perspective. Thinking I’ve got some kind of experience. And maybe, I thought, that experience means I’m not as susceptible to surprise as I once was. Like: I know enough now to know how this goes. Like: I can see the end coming from a long way off. Like: There is no twist to this plotline.
But the truth is we never know as much as we think we know. If anything, getting older is a revelation that there are more mysteries and stupefications and curveballs in my life than I ever dreamed possible.
I’m not saying this like it’s a bad thing. The cynical can’t be gobsmacked. And so my current state, staggering around dumbstruck and heartsore, is evidence not only that I am alive but that I am Feeling It. Every ticking second, of every one of these days, I am feeling it.
I am not going to enumerate the thousand-thousand directions in which my heart is currently shattered because what is a woman without her secrets?
But I will tell you a story.
I traveled to the States recently, on a solo trip with a long list of destinations. One destination was my hometown, where my nephew was graduating from high school. This in itself was a big enough deal for a homecoming — there were family dinners to attend, and a joyous party, and the big night of pomp and circumstance, blue mortarboards thrown up toward the spotlights, all those teenagers on the brink of the next Big Thing. But there was another reason for return.
A few days before my plane left Lisbon, my mother was admitted to a Memory Care ward.
If you’ve been reading me for any length of time, you’ve read about my mother. About how Alzheimer’s has erased her mind one agonizing inch at a time. About the ways in which she has become alien to us all, as one by one we die off like neurons and learn to bear the blank gaze she turns on us when we call her Mom.
My mother has been breaking my heart for a very long time. As I often broke hers.
This move, out of the blue-tin-roofed farmhouse and into a ward with a locked door, has been a long time coming. My sister and I have been trying to get my father to admit to this possibility for years, as our mother declined and our options dwindled. Finally this spring, he stopped saying that he could take care of her. He stopped saying that he promised her she could die in that yellow house. He stopped saying that we hadn’t even gotten to the bad part yet.
The bad part was every day. The bad part was all the time.
And so, after months of visiting facilities all over the county and several surrounding, my sister called with the news that she had finally found a good one that we could actually afford. It came with glowing recommendations of friends whose family members had lived there, who had worked there. The staff was kind and conscientious. The social worker was not worried by any of our mother’s dementia difficulties.
“Oh yeah,” she would say as my dad and my sister enumerated all the things they struggled to get mom to do, “we’re used to that. It’s not a problem at all.”
There was an open bed. They’d help with the Medicaid application. They circled a Tuesday on the calendar when mom could come to stay. The week before my plane touched the tarmac at O’Hare.
I went to see my mom by myself, that first time, on my way into town. I had to ask the nurse at the desk how to buzz myself through the windowless doors and into the ward. Had to ask another nurse where to find Sue Witmer. They pointed to a door on my right, a photo of my parents affixed there with bright green tape. My mom was sitting up in an armchair when I walked into the room. Dressed in a soft blue flowered gown, her white hair a nimbus around her head. She looks smaller every time I see her.
She looked up as I approached her chair, no recognition in her eyes. I introduced myself, as I do every time I see her now. As I do now that I no longer call her by her mother-name, because it doesn’t seem fair to call a person a mother if they no longer believe themselves to be so.
“Hi Sue,” I said, bright as a button, “I’m LaDonna.”
The barest crook of a smile lifted the left corner of her lips. “I know,” she nodded, “I know.”
I am 1000% sure she did not know. Not my name, not my daughterhood. And yet, some child-sized part of me twitched forward, all eagerness, all reaching, and my own smile wobbled in place when I bent down to kiss her forehead. She grabbed my hands in a papery clutch, smacked her lips against mine, booped my nose with a finger and wrinkled her own at me. “Hi!” she said.
And that was one of the shatterings.
Later, she told me she missed me. She told me she loved me. She asked me where I had been.
And the thing about your mom saying these things is that you want to believe it is your mom saying these things but it wasn’t.
Well-meaning people say, “Maybe she’s still in there somewhere, maybe some part of her still knows who she is, who you are!” Well-meaning people say a lot of well-meaning things but they don’t know my mom and they don’t know what the last years have been like and they don’t know how you know that while the emotions she feels are real, in the moment, they are not really for me. They are not really for me.
And this is another shattering.
I can pretend, for a time, that she sees me. That she knows me. That she misses me.
And I did, for a few minutes on that first visit, I did. I held her small hands and I told her I love her and I told her I miss her and I told her, my voice breaking into shards, “Oh Mom, I wish you never lost your mind! I would really love to talk to you right now!” And her eyes were wet like mine and she said, “Me too,” and she looked at me wonderingly and she said, “What is your name?”
That night I met my dad for dinner at his favorite taco stand, the one with the runny refried beans and the hot sauce that wouldn’t make a mosquito sneeze. He helped me bump my suitcases up to the back bedroom with the blue curtains that overlooks the big red barn, the one whose bed wears the quilt my mom made in a different lifetime.
We made plans for breakfast and grocery shopping and he asked me to help him file his tax receipts in the proper folders and then he said, “You must be real tired, I’ll see you in the morning,” and we said good night.
And I brushed my teeth and rummaged through the suitcase for my pajamas and I was almost asleep before I realized what felt so wrong. This was the first time, it hit me, the first time ever in my entire life I had gone to sleep in my parents’ house without my mother in it.
You know when they say you can feel your heart breaking?
I thought I was too old for that. I thought I left that kind of hurt behind in my twenties, with lost loves and dead end dreams, but I lay there beneath that quilt and I let the tears run into my ears and I felt how sharp were the broken corners inside my chest, how endless was the breaking.
There is no happy ending to this story, reader, there is no way to smooth it out.
But that’s not the point of a busted heart, I don’t think. Love and loss cannot be separated. Everyone we love, someday we lose. There’s a song by The Flaming Lips that a dear friend turned me on to recently. Do you realize, the lyric goes, that everyone you know someday will die? / and instead of saying all of your goodbyes / let them know you realize that life goes fast / it's hard to make the good things last / you realize the sun doesn't go down / it's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round…
The pain I’m feeling is proof that I’m alive. It’s evidence of my love. Of my mother’s love.
I want to be tender enough to break.
I want to be soft enough to feel it.
I want to be strong enough to survive it.
But more than anything, I want to remember it. The love. The loss. The reality of it.
She was here. I was here. We were here together.
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Copyright © 2026 LaDonna Witmer • {all photos by author}
Beautiful words "The pain I’m feeling is proof that I’m alive. It’s evidence of my love. Of my mother’s love."
Terribly sad but oh my god, so beautifully written. Two decades ago, I lost my mother suddenly and it essentially broke me for a full year before I fully recovered. At the time I thought sudden death was the most difficult to deal with yet now I realize, especially after reading this, that watching someone you dearly love disappear is much harder. My heart goes out to you, LaDonna.