A Room at the Top of the World

There's beauty everywhere.  Sometimes you just have to look a little harder to find it.

And then somedays, thankfully, you don't have to look very hard at all, because beauty is right there in front of you.  That was yesterday morning with mom, for me.

On the heels of an encouraging team meeting at NHC Place to review Mom's progress and current condition with the staff mid-week - great appetite, funny, a pleasure to deal with - I drove down yesterday (Sat.) morning to see her.  When I arrived, she was up and had finished breakfast in the common area.  She was sitting in her wheelchair, watching television, nodding off a bit.  She smiled when I sat down beside her and we talked for a minute or two.

I suggested we go for a walk, she agreed and I wheeled her to the doors, punched in the code and off we went down the hall.  Lately, on weekends, we've been walking to a small courtyard inside the facility, where we can sit against the wall, in the shade, and watch the birds feed at a couple of bird feeders nestled underneath 3 or 4 small trees.  That's where we went yesterday and I settled into a rocking chair beside her, after I positioned her wheelchair so she could look at the flowers, trees and birds in the courtyard.

Mom was alert and in a good mood.  She laughed when I showed her part of a video of Joe reading "Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus," by Mo Willems.  I took a couple of pictures of her and posted them on Instagram.  She laughed as I tried to explain to her how Instagram worked, especially when I told her that her picture had been posted for all of the world to see.  We talked some more, watched the birds and settled into the kind of comfortable silence you can only enjoy with someone you've known your entire life.  

After a few minutes, I looked over and saw that she had nodded off.  It was a beautiful summer morning in Nashville - not humid with the early temperature in the low 80's - although, of course, it got hotter later in the day.  Every now and then, she woke up and looked over at me.  We sat there for a while longer, just the two of us, my mother blissfully unaware of anything other than the moment in which she was living.

There's a kind of Zen in that, I think.  Maybe, just maybe, as she has settled in at NHC Place, a tiny bright spot of this terrible disease that's robbed her of so much is that my Mom is living in the moment.  Yesterday, at least, for one Saturday, she was happy and at peace.  I was, too.

And it was beautiful.