I always find this season somewhat trying. I live in the cold north and we are currently buried under snow. It seems to let up only for intermitent freezing rain. Bleck.
Smiles have been hard to come by in my abode of late. Less than 2 wks ago we said goodbye to a trusted and dearly loved pet, our wild and unruly golden husky dog. It’s a real heart breaker, no way around it. He was noisy and lively, ill mannered and excitable, and now the quiet is just deafening. He was at my side through thick and thin and my ears ache to hear the ‘clack, clack’ of his claws on the hardwood floors. Heavy sigh…
There are good days and bad days in the strange world I currently inhabit. As a caregiver to my MIL I struggle everyday.
(Stroke survivor, paralysed, bedridden. Think; caregivers, laundry, therapists, laundry, Drs, laundry, with a side of annoying officialdom, a major in pharmacology and a minor in medicine, kinda like that.)
Her’s is not any easy life and she is not, understandably, joyful. She has her moments, but it’s only moments. (We’ve tried a lot of different things but she’s not much interested in anything.) Mercifully she hasn’t strung the days together to see it’s been almost 5 years. The other side of that coin is watching everyday be as tragic as the first when she sees she’s still in her bed, unable to care for herself in any way. It makes my heart ache still, after all of this time. But I’ve learned that if life is sucking you got to keep on trucking.
So it’s against this somewhat bleak background that this story is set.
Where was I? Oh yeah, the days were a struggle, smiles were hard to find, lots of heavy sighing, not a few tears. And the weather, bleck.
So four days after the tragic loss of my dog, it was Valentine’s day and Mr Elbows gifted me a wonderful Ipod Shuffle. And it nearly killed him, I know for a fact, he so wanted it to be an Ipod mini, but I really wanted the Shuffle, so low tech, very few controls, clearly designed just for me. And I love it, it has really bought me a sense of privacy when there are peoples coming and going from my house. (I miss my privacy the very most through all of this, but I digress.) It proved a really wonderful gift that definitely brightened my world.
That night we begin to speculate that perhaps we should get one for MIL, we could load her music in, set it up for her. Keeping in mind we have tried many things before which excited us but not her in the end. So we started talking to her about it. I don’t know how much she really understood, to be honest. Digital music she’s not sure about, but she liked the idea that it was the coolest and latest technology. The whole being ‘hip’ thing sort of caught her. So within 24 hrs we purchased another (I think they were 129 C), loaded it up and set her up to go.
And you know what? It has actually and literally brought a song to her lips. Okay maybe it’s not singing in the traditional sense, she doesn’t manage much more than talking along, but it’s her singing to be sure. She’s singing Stormy Weather with Lena Horne as I write this. When I hear her sing, I can feel her spirit sing a little. And when we see her smile I feel our spirits sing a little.
Whenever we hear it, we both cannot help but crack into great big smiles. I can’t help but picture this pear shaped 85 yr old grandmother shaking it like you see in the ads.
Sometimes, it seems to me, life is just one big beautiful mess.
And sometimes the joy just sneaks right up on you.
