Moments

Life is precious!

It is something we all know, but for lots of different reasons we many times forget. Often a seemingly insignificant statement or event can solidify for us how precious, fleeting, and frail life can often be.  I have been reminded of this lately!

Several months ago, my elderly mom had a fall in her apartment, a small event lead to an avalanche of issues, problems, and objectives to reach. I talk about that in the post “A Little Fall”.  While the story is still not over an outcome of that fall was that my mother ended up in a rehabilitation facility for two months. This particular facility prides itself on the fact that they have had zero COIVID cases since the pandemic altered our lives in March of 2020. That is something to be proud of! To pull that off the facility allows very little interaction with residents. In part, because of the sheer volume of residents, it is hard to organize all the families/people that want to visit. That is made much more complicated by the fact that on any visit there can be only two people present, six feet of distance is mandatory, it is preferable that the visits be in designated areas and preferably outside. And the visit can only be for thirty minutes. They do all of that for the protection of their clients, and it seems to be working. Zero cases since March 2020.

Clearly, these necessary actions to protect are hard on the residents and their families. Honestly, we just miss our loved ones!

I am grateful for modern conveniences although those conveniences many times come at a price. One of them is the cell phone, because of these great tools I get to call my mother, every morning, and every night. Well, that is when she is able to sort the phone out and get it working, LOL. She is ninety-two so give her a little grace. Those calls are not very long, we usually do not take about significant things, and many times we are saying pretty much what we said the day before. Quite often we end the call with the emotionally charged words “I love you”.

On most of those calls, my mother’s voice will begin to tremble and she will say with a flood of emotion I have rarely felt in life “I love you Vinny”. I those four simple words I can feel all the passion, pain, ethos, and emotion that sixty-five years of connection and relationship with another human being brings at an intensity that crushes and overwhelms me. I realize, this is it, this is what life comes down to, a few spoken words, maybe in a sterile hospital room, maybe over a phone separated by miles, but because those “moments” and words are saturated with love and long experience, you realize, life is worth it!

When I reflect on the “moments” I had with my beautiful daughter, they are first too few, and second numerous.

Around our home I can remember the places she played, the spot in our driveway where she stood so proudly with her dirt bike, the hillside where Lauren and her brother would explore for hours on end, always in her trademark off white shirt, rusty orange parachute pants, and her favorite blue denim baseball hat … they were all powerful moments … that are priceless today.

Don’t miss the moments, because when it’s all said and done the simplest of moments will be the most profound.

This weeks featured image is by Brooke Shaden, I am not sure of the title.