“Mom, would you read this page out loud to me?” I was sitting next to my mother on the couch in the den. The words I had written for her to read to me were on a page on her lap. She looked steadily at me. 

I looked into her brown eyes, smiled and said, “Mom, I would really love you to read these words out loud to me.” She looked away from me and down at the sentence. She paused for a long moment. Then, in a strong voice, a voice I hadn’t heard in a long time, my mother read: “I love to feel the sunshine on my face.” 

I was thrilled to hear her speak. In 1998, my mother, Shirley Burdick, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Since 2000, as she’d entered more advanced stages of the disease, she had spoken almost entirely in monosyllables. 

The joy I was feeling must have been a lot like the joy she and my father had felt more than 50 years earlier when I first read out loud to them. “Mom, how does the sun feel on your face?” I waited patiently. Another long moment went by. Her eyes met mine. I asked again, “Mom, how do you feel when you are in the sunshine?” Another moment, and then I could tell she knew what she wanted to say. “Warm” my mother said. “Oh,” I said, “The sun feels warm on your face? It feels warm on my face too!” Then I asked, “Do you like to feel the sun on your face?” Her eyes were shining. “Yes,” she said, “I do!” 

Shirley and Larry Burdick had four children. I am the oldest and then came Annie, Bill, and Vivian. I always felt I had the best family of all my friends. My parents did so much to give us a full life. We went on family vacations in the ’59 DeSoto station wagon from our apartment in lower Manhattan — throughout New York state, Vermont , Canada . Our biggest trip was going out West to visit the places where my    parents had honeymooned: the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Zion , and the Grand Tetons. 

My parents also shared with us their passion for music and reading. Mom taught the four of us to play the piano. She sang soprano in a choral society for 30 years; eventually, my dad agreed to join her when she convinced him the chorus needed more tenors!

When I was young, I often went to the library with my mother, and she encouraged me to go on my own when I was old enough. Many times, when I went to kiss her goodnight through the years, I found her curled up with a book.

For 22 years, my mother taught kindergarten at P.S. 130 in Manhattan ’s Chinatown . Music and reading were a big part of what she did with her students. Sometimes I visited her art-filled, cheerful classroom, and watched her read storybooks and play the piano and sing with the children. Many of her students had immigrant parents; they asked my mother to give American names to their children, and today there are hundreds of Chinese-Americans in their 30s and 40s with names that Mom gave them in kindergarten. Her classroom was a happy and fun place. 

My folks also enjoyed the opera and attended the Metropolitan Opera for years. Mom became a tour guide there and enjoyed taking visitors on the backstage tour.

When my mother started having problems guiding the tours at the Met, we first became aware that she was experiencing some memory loss. Soon, she stopped leading the tours and over the next couple of years stopped doing everyday activities like preparing meals and dressing herself. All too soon, she stopped initiating any conversation and answered questions with one word. As she became unable to function independently, my father took over caring for all her needs and managing the household.

When I visited my mother during the last three years of her life, I often sat with her when she ate a meal, encouraging her to eat. If the weather was nice, we went outside for a little walk or we sat by the playground, watching the children play. I told my mother about my life and I asked her about hers — I asked questions that she could have answered with more than one word, but she rarely did.   

Our main activity during her last few years was playing the piano together. We sat at the Steinway and I played the right-hand melody line while Mom played the chords with her left hand. Amazingly, even though my mother was progressively deteriorating physically and cognitively from her disease, she could play complex chords pretty accurately and without hesitation when we sat at the piano with sheet music in front of us. In the last year of her life, she wasn’t playing as well, but we still played the piano together until a week before she died, in the summer of 2003. 

My mother and I played songs from an 1890s – 1920s songbook. One song we liked to play was “Bill Bailey Won’t You Please Come Home” because my family always substituted the name Bill Burdick in honor of my brother. I usually sang when we played and invited Mom to sing too, but I could not interest her in singing along with me. My dad, however, was always in a singing mood when Mom and I played the piano, which made this an uplifting activity for the three of us. 

Okay, I thought, playing the piano is great. What else can I do with Mom that she would enjoy?

One day, I went with my parents to their eye doctor. As we sat in the waiting room, I found a Time magazine to read; Dad picked up Newsweek. I looked around for something for my mother. There were only magazine articles about germ warfare and the top ten reasons to eat broccoli. 

After the exam, the doctor said, “Shirley can read the New York Times if she wants to.” It was great to know that her vision was that good, but with her advanced Alzheimer’s, Dad and I knew that she would not be reading the Metro Section anytime soon.

Back at their apartment, I looked around for something simple enough for Mom to read with me. Nothing. I went to a large bookstore. Again, no luck. There seemed to be absolutely nothing appropriate for my mother with Alzheimer’s to read.

I wondered if Mom wasn’t speaking because the disease had made her “lose her way” to the words. Experts explained that people with Alzheimer’s do eventually experience disruptions in the language centers of the brain — some sooner and others later in the disease process. I wanted to help Mom find her way to more words. I determined that I would round up some words for my mother to read and say and give them to her in a book of her own. And since I was choosing the words, I wanted them to be positive and enthusiastic. 

So I wrote simple words for my mother about loving everyday activities that she could still do at the time, like taking a warm bath and eating apple pie with vanilla ice cream. I was hoping that these words would give Mom a chance to use her voice again. I asked a friend to draw some illustrations and then I put it all together in a book. I realized that I now had a number of ways to use this new activity with my mother: She could read the words aloud to me, I could read aloud to her, we could take turns reading, we could look at the colorful pictures, and I could ask her questions and “discuss” the words and pictures with her. It worked!

My mother engaged with the words and the pictures and answered my questions about both. After reading aloud “I love to take a warm bath and get squeaky clean,” my mother looked intently at the drawing. “What is your favorite part of this picture?” I asked. She pointed to the white-haired woman in the tub. I asked, “What is she doing?” My mother, a woman who loved her baths said, “Soaking.” “Oh,” I said, “who else likes to soak?” Her face lit up and she said, “I do!” I got a smile from her that made my day.

My sister, Annie, who lives in Florida , called one day when I was visiting my parents. My mother and I had just finished reading our book, "The Sunshine on My Face." I told Annie about this book I had written for Mom and asked if she wanted me to read it to her over the phone. Then it occurred to me to give Mom the phone and have her read to Annie.

And read she did. I sat next to Mom, the book covering our two laps. I guided her through the book, reading an occasional page to her and asking questions about the content and drawings as we went along. 

After we finished reading the book, I took the phone back from my mother. Annie said, “Thank you for the gift.” When I asked Annie what she meant, she said, “I called Mom expecting to hear just her usual one or two words. When she read the book with you, she was speaking in sentences for the first time in years. Hearing her voice — and her pleasure — that was a gift!”