The Colorado Zephyr

Last night on our drive home from Denver we past the California Zephyr Train just past Glenwood Springs. It was a special moment. Driving 80 miles an hour slowly overtaking the classic silver locomotive. It was dark but the windows of the train were all lit up. It was surreal ridding alongside the Silver Bullet. My daughters shared a story about their train ride from New York to Boston. Talked about napping on the train as they traveled through the rain and snow. Said it was the best possible way to travel. It was a fitting ending to our weekend adventure visiting family and friends in Denver.. It's memories like theses that make all the struggle traveling moore worth it.  

What Mom Said

Seeing Mom was great. She struggles with severe short-term memory loss and gets really confused, but she knows who she is and recognizes me. The idea of not being able to make new memories terrifies me, But this is a happy post so I will not dwell in the negative. My mom is happy. She had spent her entire life being happy happy. It’s something she would always say. Even named the boat Happy Happy, I sorta liked it, J hated it.

Anyway she’s happy.

I saw her Tuesday and Wednesday and it is now Saturday. I spent a lot of time in the solitude of traveling alone. Thought a lot about what she said. Thought a lot about everything. I been working on becoming more mindful. Being present. Being engaged. And I realized my mom had been focused and engaged. She listened to everything I’d said and wouldn’t remember any of it. Tomorrow she will not remember I was there. When we are talking about something she remembers she is completely engaged. When talking about tomorrow she concentrates and starts getting confused. So I let her drive the conversation and it went well. She talked about her and Dad watching all my sports games. She told me how proud my father was about what a special athlete and student I was. And how he so loved our wedding and he told her it was like being in Heaven. Or what he hoped Heaven would be like. It was great to hear. 

She said how much love and happiness I had brought into the family. She said she would not have known what to do whiteout me showing her how to move on with life after Karen died. I said no Mom it was you and Dad who helped us live on. The agenda was life and you and Dad lived it. And what a good life it is. She said you sound like your father. I told her people think I look like him. She said he had more hair.

She is in the moment and that is enough. 

Happy Dance

Blessed to have visited Mom twice this past week.

The first visit was just before lunch and the second a day later in the evening. During the second visit she started getting agitated because she could not remember anything from my previous visit. I told her to relax and not worry about it. I asked her to talk about something she did remember and she said, "I remember you were one of the most daring athletes in the world!" I said you must be remembering Dad? And she said, "No, he's the one who said it about you. After one of your games he said to me you are the most daring athletes he has ever seen on the football field." Wow. What else did he say about me? "He said he was afraid for you, not that you would get hurt, but that you would kill someone and he knew that would haunt you. He said you were fierce. He said you played best when someone made you angry. He would say Honey watch now because your son is about to unleash some rage. Whenever he would say this you would always do something spectacular."