The prompt for my Story Republic writing group this week was “Sink or Swim”. As I contemplated what I would write, my week exploded, my camping trip abruptly ended when my elderly dad was rushed to the Health Sciences Centre with a potential stroke. I was without a car and frantic as I hitched a ride from a friend to my parents hometown and then drove my mother into the city so we could be at his bedside.
Then, this happened…
I witness my dad singing “You Are My Sunshine” in his soft steady voice while medical staff scurry around him. The chaos in the ER ward at HSC is in stark contrast to the soft whispering of this cherished childhood rhythm. My mother strokes his cheek, her familiar voice calming the agitation we’d witnessed when we first arrived.
Later, as he continues to chant this melody, the doctor, who is assessing him with questions he can’t answer, (including my and my mother’s names), brushes his arm, saying “You’re very kind Glenn.”
She’s right. His sweetness shines through even in the most difficult times.
My anguished heart is continuously searching for the light that my father’s dementia regularly tries to dim.
Perhaps this is it: Remembering a ballad he sang in the days when dementia was as fleeting as the leaves that dropped from the abundant trees around my childhood home, blowing away in the evening breeze.
I wanted to share this because I feel in my heart this is what makes us stronger in difficult times. When I posted this on social media, one friend wrote “Sometimes the greatest gifts are the simplest things. Sometimes, perhaps too often, these go unrecognized by us.”
Indeed.
Our despair needn’t sink us.
Instead we can choose to swim through the heartbreak of the long good-bye and embrace the quiet grace and presence of those who are still with us, however they show up.
We can receive their unpredictable, quivering gifts with the same grace.
They ask nothing more from us.
We need nothing more from them.
