As Sand is to Beach, Moments are to Life
I can let them slip away, or I can savor them.
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Moment #1
Mom said my name the other day.
“Jodi.”
Just rambling a string of nonsense with the rhythm of conversation and sense, then “Jodi,” followed by more word salad. She wasn’t addressing me, not the me in the room. Maybe there was another me, or maybe jodi was just a word stuck in her mind that got unstuck for a moment. A word that escaped out her mouth the way all the others do, making sense to her alone.
“Jodi.”
A name I’ve disliked all my life, wishing for something less…gender neutral maybe, less beige. I don’t like the shape of a capital letter J, chose lowercase ages ago.
I heard her say my name. A sound I hadn’t heard in…months.
It took my breath away.
Moment #2
I was listening in on a mother and daughter shopping near me. Listening in to other people’s conversations is a habit developed during dinners out with Mom. We eavesdropped on tables near us and then talked about them in whispers, what they were eating, wondering about their lives, who they were when they weren’t here at the table next to us.
In DSW, a mother and daughter stood nearby, shopping for shoes for themselves. For each other. The easy back and forth. The way you half-sentence shorthand this or that when you know someone their whole life, or your whole life and you know everything that’s in their closet and their life.
They talked about nothing important. Picking shoes for each other and chattering and the mother said something like, “You’re such a pain in the neck to hang around with,” but she said it with a smile.
Nothing important may be the best kind of conversation you can have.
It’s intimate. Being comfortable in your own skin around that person, and they in theirs with you. You need history for that kind of conversational shorthand, conversation like a buffet or an all you can eat salad bar where you take this and that, and trade your tomatoes for her mushrooms back at the table.
“I miss shopping with my mom.”
I hadn’t meant to say it aloud, but I did. Easy conversation as we’d wandered through Home Goods looking at everything, needing nothing in particular. Even the supermarket. It was the walking and talking.
The DSW mom smiled at me, and they continued down the aisle with armloads of shoe boxes, and each other.
Moment # 3
It’s 5:30 am. She’s been talking to the invisibles for maybe 30 minutes while I pull the covers over my head in the next room, pretending I don’t hear her and if I don’t hear her maybe I can get some more sleep. But then the fidgets start, and the accompanying grunts of her trying to sit up.
“Do you have to go to the bathroom, Ma?”
She looks directly at me, “Yes.”
An appropriate answer to a direct question.
A moment of connection.
We don’t get a lot of that these days. So, I sit her up, kiss her on the forehead, she laughs and I move her over to the commode, and she’s gone again talking about I don’t know what…
A Few Little Songs I’m Feeling in My Heart Right Now
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jodi, thank you for sharing these beautiful moments. My husband had dementia, too, so I know how precious they are.
It's been almost 3 years since my mom died, and I still have those moments when I'm about to call her to share some mundane or major thing with her because she would always be my first call. The connection stays even when the person is gone. Also, who can't lose all track of time in a Home Goods?!