Given Kate’s decline and my comments about sad moments, I felt a need to let you know that we still experience happy moments as well. In fact, they still outweigh the sad ones. We had a several of those yesterday. The first occurred at lunch. When our server greeted us, she reached out to give Kate a hug, something she does when we arrive and leave each Saturday. Kate gave her a warm embrace. Then she looked at me as if to introduce me and said, “This is my friend.” I agreed and said, “She is a good friend, isn’t she?” Kate beamed and said, “Yes, a very good friend.” I know that Kate doesn’t remember our server, at least by name, but she has developed a feeling for her. When she walked away, Kate said, “I like her. She’s so friendly.”
I love everything about moments like this. They are a major reason we eat out. We only get hugs at one other restaurant, but being regulars at so many places provides us with a kind of warmth that is decidedly different than the good service we receive at places we visit only periodically. And that is in addition to the people we encounter who are friends and acquaintances from our other community activities. Food really is quite secondary to the overall experience.
I don’t think I can overemphasize the pleasure Kate derives from her intuitive abilities. The experience at lunch is just one example. We experienced another special moment when we got home. As usual, she immediately looked at the flowers on our patio from the family room. She admired them a few minutes. Then she said she wanted to rest a while. She mentioned going to the bedroom, but I suggested she might want to lie down on the sofa in the family room where I would work on my laptop. She liked the idea and took a seat. As she did, she noticed one of her family photo books, this one focusing on her father’s family.
We have done so much of this that I know she can’t remember the people in the pictures and has difficulty reading the accompanying text. I asked if she would like me to go through it with her. She said yes, and I sat down beside her. We spent about thirty minutes going through about half the book. She was thoroughly enjoying herself, but she again said she was tired and wanted to finish later. Like a little child, she asked if she could lie down for a while. Then she asked if she could take her shoes off.
I sat down in a chair across from her. She was lying facing the sliding glass doors leading to the patio and backyard. She didn’t close her eyes. She looked at the dense growth of trees on our neighbor’s property. From her vantage point, she can look at them from the top of the wall on our property to the tops of the trees that are visible through the room’s skylights. She never seems to tire of admiring them. She didn’t go to sleep or even close her eyes for at least forty-five minutes. During that time, she called my attention to things she noticed like the different shades of greens, the height of the two tallest trees, and shimmering of the leaves as the wind picked up.
Last night when I got in bed, she was still awake . That’s when we had a conversation that was another happy moment of the day. We talked about the day and how nice it had been. Then I said something about our daughter. She said, “Our daughter?” I said, “Yes.” She said, “How did that happen?” I responded by telling her about our dating, falling in love, and getting married. That led her to say that we had a happy marriage. She said, “We just clicked.” She mentioned our having shared values and said, “You know, we laugh a lot. I think that helps.” We talked another ten minutes or so when she closed the conversation by saying, “and it (our marriage) is going to last. I was ready to believe that my telling the story of how we fell in love and married had jogged her memory. “Now she understands who I am.” That’s when she asked what has become a familiar question. “And what is your name?” Of course, she may have realized we are married, but I suspect she didn’t at that moment. At best, her memory lasts only seconds. It’s just as possible that she didn’t remember. I am learning, however, to take pleasure in the joy she experiences through her intuitive abilities. That seems to work. It creates a lot more happy moments than I might notice otherwise.
