I thought Parkinson’s had taken my mum away. Then we began playing poker

“Mum?”

Her eyes are closed on the screen.

“Mum, can you nod if you can hear me?”

She nods. Then her face goes still. The video call feels like looking at a photograph. My mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease nine years ago, though the tremor had been there long before.

“This runs in the family,” she used to say whenever we suggested she see a doctor. “My grandmother’s hands shook – she lived to 90. My uncle’s hands have shaken for years. He’s 89. It’s a family trait.”

We didn’t push her.

By 2017, her feet seemed glued to the floor whenever she tried to take a first step. When she finally saw a doctor, the disease had already reached an intermediate stage. I watched Parkinson’s strip her away slowly, piece by piece.

She lost the ability to walk unaided. Her handwriting, once neat, became unsteady, then unrecognisable. She could no longer sign her name. Her voice softened and thinned, as if she had a cold that never lifted. She stopped singing – once her greatest joy. Eventually, only those closest to her could understand her words.

Now she can barely eat solid food. Sometimes she chokes on her own saliva.

When I lived with her, the changes were gradual, almost untraceable. Two years ago, I moved from Shanghai to Sydney. I visit twice a year. That six-month gap makes every shift visible. On my last visit, I found her sitting at the dining table, eyes closed, drifting between sleep and waking – like a sculpture placed there and forgotten. I sat beside her.

“Mum?”

She nodded slightly.

“Open your eyes,” my father said gently, “your daughter is here.”

Her eyes remained closed. Then she raised her hand and used her fingers to lift her eyelids, slowly, as if opening something heavy. She looked at me. I remembered something. She used to love playing poker.

“Do you want to play?” I asked.

She nodded several times.

I found a deck of cards and began to deal. At the sound, she straightened her back, picked up the cards and arranged them carefully. “I know the rules,” she said, just as I started to explain. Her hands were steady, her gaze fixed.

We began. She calculated and waited, picking her moments, round by round – and she won. “Oh, just good luck,” she said lightly. But there was a faint lift at the corner of her mouth.

She won again. The energy in her face filled the room. My father drifted over to watch.

We played again.

“Too bad,” she sighed. “All the small cards keep coming to me. They’re having a meeting here.”

“Really?” I leaned over to look.

She pulled her cards closer to her but I could see them: all of them were big. She smiled. She won again. The energy in her face filled the room.

My father drifted over to watch.

“Join us,” she said.

He sat down. After a moment, quietly, he took two high cards from the top of the stack in front of him and slipped them into my mother’s. He wanted her to win. He wanted her to stay like this. She looked at the cards. Then, without a word, she picked them out and pushed them back across the table.

“No need,” she said.

No one spoke.

It was the first time in years I had seen her refuse help – not because she couldn’t use it, but because she wouldn’t. Something in her – not just memory, but something quieter and more stubborn – had not left.

Later, I learn that deeply familiar activities can sometimes reach through the disease and bring a person back, briefly.

For the rest of my visit, we played every day. Whenever she picked up her cards, she complained about her bad hand. Whenever she won, she called it luck. But we never tried to give her the good cards again.

Now I am back in Sydney. My father tells me she joins the card games less and less. The moments she can focus are shorter. Sometimes, she closes her eyes while holding the cards.

“Mum?”

I look at her face on the screen.

“Remember how you always said you had bad cards? You have a poker face – do you know that?”

Again, there is the faintest lift at the corners of her mouth. The rules are slipping away. The cards are harder to hold. But something in her still knows how to play. She is still there.

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