I agree with you, the correct way to write that is with dashes: To my mother - Ayn Rand - and God. Or or the parentheses: To my mother (Ayn Rand) and God

I agree with you, the correct way to write that is with dashes: To my mother - Ayn Rand - and God. Or or the parentheses: To my mother (Ayn Rand) and God. Then you disambiguate the extra information over the first item in the list. Which makes way more sense then including it in the list and assuming that the reader will disambiguate via their external contextual knowledge. How any rational and intelligent person could argue for anything else is beyond me. Or maybe I've stumbled upon the dark secret of the humanities?