In honor of Mother’s Day, both of our storytellers share stories about their unique relationships with their moms.

Part 1: Rita Rigano always had a complicated relationship with her mother, and it becomes even more fraught when her mother’s dementia worsens.

Rita Rigano is a NYC-based storyteller who appears locally and online. Some favorite shows include Generation Woman, New Tricks, (mostly) True Things, The Moth, The Once Upon a Time Show, and Better Said Than Done. She started storytelling with her children, presenting fairy tales with a twist at libraries and schools. She loves live theatre, live music, and swing dancing with her husband.

Part 2: In the midst of writing her PhD dissertation, Jordyn Rice embarks on one last road trip with her mother, who is dying of lung cancer.

Jordyn Rice is a postdoctoral fellow based in Vancouver, BC. She is a physical therapist and researcher dedicated to finding strategies to promote healthy aging. While she is passionate about clinical research her love of neuroscience was sparked while studying sea slugs. Outside of the lab you can find her tucked into the mountains, rock climbing, or riding her bike.

Episode Transcript

Part 1

My mom and I were, in her words, oil and water. We loved each other, but we couldn't get along. She only wanted the best for me, only the best as she saw it, which, shocking, was not usually the best as I saw it.

And my dad, he just would run interference. He'd stick up for me and he'd keep the peace.

Now, I relied on her. I mean, she was my mom. And I pushed her away, because I wanted to be independent. She worried always about everything.

Rita Rigano shares her story at Caveat in New York, NY in January 2025. Photo by Zhen Qin.

Here's one. In the town where I grew up and lived for some time as an adult, there is a street called Weaver Street. So named, yes, because it weaves its way through several towns, through three towns. And to get pretty much anywhere, you had to, at some point, drive on Weaver Street. It's a major artery and it's also just this twisty‑turny little local road.

One beautiful sunny spring day, I'm an adult, my mom calls. “Be careful driving on Weaver Street today.”

“Okay. Why? Is there construction or something?”

“No. It's windy.”

“Okay. Be careful today doing the thing I do all the time on the road that is exactly the same as it always was. Got it.”

But, no, I was. I was a little more careful that day. Why take chances? She could be a little witchy.

Oh, I could never lie to her. I was frequently creative with the truth, but a flat‑out lie, never worked. She could smell it. She'd start asking questions and keep asking questions until she had poked so many holes in your story.

After my dad died, my mom went into a senior living facility. She made friends. I showed up every weekend. I called her every day. She was the one who was always so independent and now she depended on me, which meant that she worried about me even more because she needed me. That put such a strain on our visits and on our phone calls as she got more and more controlling, and my dad wasn't there to referee.

March 12, 2020. I take my mom to her annual physical. Now, the doctor is very pleased. “Rosemarie, Rosemarie, you're in terrific shape.”

“No. I don't want that. I'm 96. I'm ready to go.”

Doctor told me privately that her dementia was advancing. It's not concerning yet. She still does her hair, her makeup, she bathes and dresses herself. She still wears her signature scent, Elizabeth Arden’s Red Door perfume, which I hated the smell of so much, but I dutifully kept her well supplied with it.

That same day, her facility went into lockdown, the coronavirus pandemic. No more visitors, no more communal meals in the dining room, no more activities. This wasn't good for my very extroverted mom and multiple daily phone calls were not enough.

“When are you coming?”

“I can't, Mom, they're not allowing visitors.”

She didn't like that. Rosemarie never thought the rules applied to her.

About two weeks into this isolation, she tells me that my dad is visiting her. She's glad to see him, but she doesn't know how he got in and why he won't talk to her.

Her health started to deteriorate and about two weeks after that, on the anniversary of my father's death, she died.

It was months before I could get in to clear out that apartment. And when we stepped in, the smell of Elizabeth Arden's Red Door was everywhere. It was in the couch cushions, it was in her clothes, it was in the towels in the bathroom. It felt like she was there watching me and judging.

Around the same time, I had an MRI of my head for a minor vision thing. The vision thing is fine, but you have an aneurysm on your right carotid artery in your brain.

This is what's called an incidental finding, because they found something that isn't what they were looking for.

Aneurysm, carotid artery, brain, all this sounds scary. Oh, I am so glad my mom is gone. I could never have lied to her about this and her worrying would have driven her and me crazy.

Now, if you're wondering exactly what an aneurysm is, picture a garden hose connected to a sprinkler on your lawn. Imagine that there's a little bubble on the surface of that hose. The surface of the bubble is thinner, because it's stretched out. And now, turn on the water and there's water going through that hose to the sprinkler. As it goes, it's putting pressure on that bubble. And enough pressure, the bubble could burst and then there's water all over your lawn.

It's like that, except if my aneurysm bursts, it could kill me. There are no symptoms that you've got one. Short of an incidental finding, there's no way to know. And there's no lifestyle changes you can do to protect yourself, to manage it or to prevent it. I have a ticking time bomb in my head.

I see a neurosurgeon at Mount Sinai and he explains the procedure is they will go in through the groin up through my body into my brain and they will stuff the aneurysm and put in a stent to hold the stuffing in place and then the blood can't get in there and it won't burst.

Great. Let's do it.

The day arrives. I'm in pre‑op and everybody who comes by introduces themselves and tells me why they're there.

“Hi, my name is Alejandro, and I'm going to insert your intravenous. What is your name and date of birth?”

“I'm Dr. Olivo. I'm the anesthesiologist. What is your name and date of birth?”

Over and over, and I tell them. They check the chart and then they do the thing that they have to do. My husband, Ron, is sitting next to me.

We're just about done with this receiving line of medical professionals. A woman comes over and she says, "We're ready for you now. My name is Rosemarie and I'll be your nurse in surgery. What is your name and date of birth?"

I couldn't speak. Ron had to answer for me.

Rosemarie took me into surgery, into the operating room. The surgery went well. The surgeon told me afterwards that it took longer than expected, because as they were snaking these instruments and cameras and things through my body, which is pretty amazing technology, actually, but as they were doing this, they discovered that my arteries were a little more windy than usual.

And I pictured my mother's spirit whispering in his ear, “Be careful. It's windy.”

I spent the night in the neurological ICU. I had a big room with glass walls and doors facing out to the hallway so I could see out, they could see in. But when those doors were closed, couldn't hear any of the noise from the very busy ICU hallway.

But there were so many people coming in and out. I had multiple IVs in both arms, attached to the monitor. I've got to keep my legs straight so that the groin doesn't open and start to bleed, and all this.

I finally fall asleep and I'm awakened by the monitor beeping. There's no one in the hallway.

I press the button. The monitor is beeping. I press the button, and a woman comes in that I hadn't seen before. She looks at me, she looks at the monitor, turns off the beeping. She comes around the bed and straightens my arm.

She said, “You bent your arm while you were sleeping and so the monitor couldn't get the information that it needs. Okay. Keep your arm straight.”

She comes back around my bed and she leaves. And I am enveloped in a cloud of Elizabeth Arden's Red Door perfume. That smell that I hated so much was like a hug. “Hi, Mom.”

My mother's love for me was fierce and controlling and our relationship was prickly. And yet, knowing she was there with me in that way at that time gave me back something that was lost through all the years of adult conflict and my dad's death and her dementia. I remembered how I relied on her and I remembered how she was always there for me. It gave me back my mom.

Thank you.

Part 2

“Mom, why the heck do you need a new shirt when you're just going to die soon?” This thought comes bursting into my head as I stand in Target. I look down at my mom and she's wearing a staple of her wardrobe, this blue‑and‑orange tie‑dyed Broncos t‑shirt.

Thankfully, I bite my tongue and I muster the best smile I can. Then I look down and just say, "Okay, Mom."

Jordyn Rice shares her story at Fox Cabaret in Vancouver, BC in November 2023. Photo by Chung Chow.

Just about a year before this Target incident, I was living in Miami. I worked part‑time as a physical therapist in a hospital and I was pursuing my PhD studies in physical therapy neuroscience. I'd also just turned 30 and then the world was on the brink of a global pandemic.

It's the Friday night. I'm in my lab and we're about to go into lockdown. We're trying to prepare for what we're going to do next. It's at this point that I realize that my mom quite likely has cancer. So I book a flight home for that weekend so I can go get some answers.

Within a couple of weeks of being back in Arizona, my suspicions are confirmed and my mom has stage 4 lung cancer. It had already spread throughout multiple organs within her body. She was given about three weeks to live without treatment, and maybe a year if she did pursue treatment.

Now, I don't know if there's ever a great time to get news of your impending death, but we were on the verge of a global pandemic. No, we were in a global pandemic. What was the point of pursuing treatment if you can't hug the people that you love without fear? On top of that, my mom had watched her older brother die of leukemia, so she was pretty certain that she didn't want a long, drawn‑out sickness, and she didn't want to take her last breaths in a hospital.

So we had some conversations and I told her, "Hey, Mom, give chemo a shot. If you don't like it, you don't have to do it," so she decides to go for it.

It's at this point that we start thinking, “Well, what are we going to do this year? What do we have to look forward to?” So we start making some plans.

When she starts chemo, we talk to her oncologist about this. One of our ideas was to plan this really epic road trip. We tell him about it and he's on board. He's super supportive.

Fast forward, we're back in that Target shopping center and we had just come from her oncology appointment. At this point, she had done really well over the years. She was getting better. And on this visit, we realized that her most recent scan showed that she had a new type of brain tumor and that the end was likely near.

Her oncologist told us that day, “It's time to take your trip. We'll start hospice when you get back.”

So, we head to Target to get the last supplies we need for this road trip. I'm irrationally irritable at this point, as you can tell by my response to my mother. We spent some more time scouring through Target and, eventually, she does indeed find her nice, new blue‑and‑white tie‑dyed Mickey Mouse t‑shirt.

A couple weeks later, we're ready to go on our trip. It's July 1st, and we've got a whole caravan. My best friend and her nine‑year‑old daughter, and Sal, this ‘90s‑era Eurovan, my younger brother and his girlfriend and their dog, and Bert, this little blue sports car, and it's my dad, my mom, and I and my dog, and Stan, the wannabe campervan. Our plan is to head north to go through Joshua Tree and, eventually, up to Yosemite and into the Redwoods where my brother used to live in Humboldt County.

Day one, we get started. I'm realizing that this trip is not going to go quite as planned. The six‑hour drive to Joshua Tree took us about ten hours. We ate cold sandwiches in a gas station parking lot, instead of a warm meal around a campfire. But we did eventually sleep under a clear desert sky filled with stars.

We also realized at this point my mom did not have enough pain medicine to make it through the rest of the trip. It made the driving a little bit more complicated than we wanted, but we pursued and we went northward. Eventually, we make it to our campsite outside of Yosemite where we plan to spend the next four days.

In one of these days, we take this day trip to Mono Hot Springs. All of us load up into Sal, so there's seven of us. Part of this trip involves this hour‑drive along this sketchy, windy, rocky, dirty road. We're kind of bobbling along and we eventually make it.

We set my dad up at the base of the river with the dogs and some camp chairs and two of us lugged my mom into this river. We kind of float her out. We're squealing as the cold water splashes on us. My brother runs ahead to go scout out where these hot springs are.

He comes back and says, “All right, it's about like maybe a 20‑minute walk.”

I look at my mom, “What do you think? You want to give it a shot?” She's not walking very well at this point.

She's like, “All right, let's give it a shot.”

So, two of us lug her out of the riverbank and we hike on up. Begrudgingly, she lets us carry her to the hot springs for efficiency's sake. I don't think we would have ever made it if she just walked there.

So we put her in the hot springs and my niece is standing there with an umbrella to shade her from the sun. I realized that that was a little bit more involved to get her up there than we thought, so I run back to camp to go find an inner tube. We have this great idea. Instead of walking back, we'll float her down the river and this will make life a lot easier.

I come back. I've got the inner tube. We somehow perched my very short mother into this floaty tube, we get her balanced and then the rest of us kind of follow her down this rocky, shallow river, kind of avoiding the boulders. We eventually make it back to my father who was holding down the fort with the dogs, and he's videoing us on his cell phone.

We all get back into the van and we bobble back down the mountain. At this point, every bump we hit, my mom is grimacing in pain. We really sucked a lot of energy out of her.

At this point, we are deciding to go to an Airbnb for a few days. Maybe we'll get some recovery if we can all sleep in real beds that will help kind of rejuvenate her so we can finish this trip, because, at this point, we really don't know. Do we keep going or do we just go home?

We make it to the Airbnb and one thing you should know is that I'm kind of the oddball in my family. I come from a family of stoners, to be quite honest. It's fine. I don't typically partake, but I also don't typically encourage their behaviors a lot. But here I am turning to my brother, like, “I need you to just get Mom real stoned. Maybe that will, like, help with her pain.”

And he was like, “All right, we'll see what we could do.”

It doesn't really work. They're just real stoned but the pain is still persisting. But we continue northward from here as well.

We eventually make it to my brother's house in Northern California. At this point, I decided that I'm going to book her and I a flight home because I don't think she's going to make the 20‑hour drive back. I book us a flight for two days later and the plan was for my dad and brother to drive the car back down to Arizona and meet us there.

These last two days go even worse than the first seven days. Like, this is not a long time. It feels like months on the road, but it was a week. She has gone downhill. At this point, she is starting to get confused and agitated and we're kind of all struggling. Like, “How do we manage this?”

The day before our flight, trying to get her comfortable, and she's no longer making sense. She has this, like, altered mental status. She's laying in bed but she's restless, so then she gets up and she kind of like wobbles around the apartment. Then she lays back down, and it's just up and down.

At this point, my dad is hiding in the living room, snuggling the dogs, because he just can't watch his best friend go like this. It's too much for him.

My brother and I are standing in the doorway, kind of looking around like, “What the heck is going on here?” We're convinced that these are our last moments with our mom.

So we lean our head on each other and we have this tender, teary‑eyed moment. My brother turns to me and he says, “Jordyn, you can't let Mom die in my bed.”

And I'm like, "You're a brat. What do you want me to do about this?"

I know that my mom doesn't want to die in a hospital. That's not on the table, but I can't let her die here. So, all right, back to the drawing board.

Eventually, I make a few phone calls, decide to go to the ER and I'll just tell them our plan. Like, let's get her good enough so we can go home tomorrow.

We get to the ER. I explain our situation to the physician. He's looking at me a little bit questionably. I'm looking at my mother thrashing around in a hospital bed like, “Yeah, I don't know what I'm doing either. This was a terrible idea.”

Eventually, they give her some medication and shift change occurs. So, 7:00 PM rolls around. We have a new attending physician coming on. I'm like, “All right, I've got to explain this story again,” feeling kind of silly.

So, I tell him the whole bit and he looks to me and he says, “Wow, what a great idea! Did you take her to Fern Canyon yet?”

And I said, “No, Doc. Look at her. We've had a rough few days. We've not made it anywhere.”

He was like, “Oh, no worries. Your flight’s at noon tomorrow?”

And I'm like, “Yeah.”

He's like, “You could take her tomorrow. We'll get her better. Before you get on the flight, just take her to Fern Canyon and you guys will have a great time.”

I'm like, "Okay, sounds good."

Eventually, we get her stable, calm. Some IV pain meds and anti‑inflammatories and she's good to go.

Around midnight, I leave the hospital with my finally‑calm mother and some prescriptions and a note from the doctor that says we can illegally park in the handicapped spot at Fern Canyon to make our trail access a little bit easier. So that was kind of him.

We get home. It's a rough night, but we all get a few hours of sleep. And it's time to wake my mom up and get on this plane to go back home.

I'm a little bit scared at this point. I don't really know who she's going to be when I wake her up. We've had a rough few days.

One of the things that the doctor gave me was a suppository. It's an antiemetic, supposed to help with nausea, and it's also a mild sedative. He's like, "Give this to her. It'll help with the flight."

I'm like, "All right.”

So, I put my clinician hat on and I glove up, and I'm like, "Hey, Mom, I got to give you some medicine. I've got to put it in your bum.” I eventually just roll her over and I do it. And, I kid you not, the first coherent words that my mother said to me in 24 hours were, "Did you just poke me in the asshole?”

“Why, yes I did.”

“Well, why?"

I then proceed to tell her about our last few days taking her to the hospital while I'm trying to get her dressed and out the door so we can catch this flight, and she's just looking at me in utter disbelief. Like, “Why would you do any of this?”

Eventually, we get to the airport. She's been a bit more with it, but then that sedative starts to kick in so she's kind of smiley and doozy, and smiley and doozy. I'm starting to have doubts about taking my drugged mother through the airport. She's dressed in my brother's big, green, baggy sweatpants and another tie‑dyed yellow‑and‑green Humboldt State t‑shirt. I'm like, “Am I going to have a Weekend at Bernie's moment at the airport right now?” I think, “But it's Humboldt County. Nobody cares.”

So, we get on the flight. We did not make it to Fern Canyon, but we did get on the flight that day, and she instantly passes out.

At this point, I become a little bit hyper‑vigilant. I'm counting her respiration rate, I'm feeling her pulse, both of which are very low, so every now and then I give her a really solid pinch. She kind of wakes up and she smiles at me and then she falls back asleep.

All I can think is, “Please don't die on this plane. Or if you do, maybe nobody will notice until we make it back to Arizona. Like, we are so close to getting back.”

Eventually, we land. My cousin picks us up from the airport and my mom is now fully lucid. She's with it and she's telling him all about it. “Can you believe she took me to the hospital,” like I was the mad woman here. And she's just going on and on and on.

We get some sandwiches and a slushie from a local chain. We eventually make it home, watch some TV. It feels like a pretty normal night.

My brother and dad make it the next morning and my mom starts hospice.

12 days later is my mom's 58th birthday. It is just my dad and I at this point. My brother has gone back to California. We woke up that morning and we kind of had a feeling that maybe today was going to be the day.

Since she had started hospice, her words were becoming less. Paragraphs were becoming sentences, sentences, words. Eventually, on that day, she didn't have any words left for us. She just kind of stared off into space.

But we woke up and we baked a German chocolate cake. We played Abba and listened to John Denver all day. We filled the house with balloons and we sang her Happy Birthday and fed her a spoonful of frosting. At the end of all of that, we turned down the lights and we lit a candle and we put on some sleepy time music. I crawled into her hospital bed with her and my dad pulled up a recliner next to her and held onto her hand. We fell asleep as the soft desert rain came down all night.

At 2:00 in the morning, he woke me up and said, “Hey, she's passed.”

He went off to bed and I stayed with her. He didn't want to be there when they took her body.

Eventually, the white van came for my mom. I kissed her forehead one last time and they took her away, wearing her nice, new, tie‑dyed Mickey Mouse t‑shirt.

When my dad woke up, we looked at each other and kind of decided there's no more work to be done this week, so we did the only thing that there was to do. We hit the road again. We headed north back to my brother's house.

Two days later, we arrived on his doorstep to surprise him with a piece of German chocolate cake for his 23rd birthday, and three months later, I defended my PhD dissertation.