October 14, 2024Monday, October 14, 2024

Just a thought… Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes. Because for those who love with heart and soul, there is no such thing as separation. [Rumi]

I’ve been thinking a lot about gratitude lately. You know me: I don’t like to leave it unexpressed. This past week we had yet another reason to be especially thankful and I’m grateful to be able to share it with you on this Thanksgiving Monday. (Spoiler alert: it’s a happy ending.)

I’ve often talked here and on our Gracefully and Frankly podcast about Mira, our friend we met through volunteering about four years ago. She turned 99 on Sept. 1 and although we’ve seen signs of her enormous and giving heart slowing down, her energy waning, we have also been blessed to experience the joy she finds in every day.

Well, not every day.

Just before Christmas of last year, it was Rob and I who delivered the news to Mira that her dear grandson had passed away. The details aren’t mine to share, only that there had been estrangement from his loved ones for some time and that finally, tragically, his family got the call that no one ever wants to receive but dreads every time there is a ring or a ping.

Since then, we’ve watched again and again as a loving grandmother’s eyes filled with tears recalling her early years as a caregiver for her beloved, brilliant and sensitive boy.

Having deep and baffling grief in common, our ties strengthened even further.

Last Tuesday in the dark pre-dawn hours, Mira pushed the button on her wristband to call and be taken to the hospital by ambulance. Although we’re not sure, it seems she might have had a mild heart attack.

Rob and I spent time with her daily. And as we sat in the sunshine outside the hospital on Saturday, trying to avoid the smoke wafting towards us from patients and their visitors who lit up nearby, we talked for a good hour. When she wondered if her heart just simply broke last December and she didn’t know it, we told her we’d heard of something like Broken Heart Syndrome, which we’d witnessed when another elderly friend suffered a heart attack upon the death of her husband of nearly fifty years. (She recovered fully and is nearing her 95^th birthday this December.)

Our gratitude is not only for Mira’s homecoming yesterday, but for the care she received at Victoria General Hospital. The nurses, Simi and Prateesh, could not have been kinder; the doctor who came by to visit was gentle in explaining to her (through us) what he thought and what was happening next. Of course, Mira has a son who lives in the area and he was the primary recipient of updates (as he should have been) but we felt honoured again to have been part of Mira’s care team. She says we’re “her kids” and although we know our places, stepping up was just what family – and dear friends – do.

The whole week of hospitalization had a strange parallel: while my own dad’s residence in Kelowna, BC has been in lockdown during a resurgence of Covid (of which he has had a seemingly mild case himself this past week), it was healing to us to be able to be with Mira daily. The way her face lit up when we poked our heads around the curtain in her room, the pleasure she took in the walks and talks we shared for hours in the past week, were everything to us. They reminded us of how many patients and residents everywhere long for the contact we were fortunate to be able to provide. And as often as our health care systems across the provinces seem to – and often do – let us down, when she needed it, great care was there.

Mira said she asked her doctor why they should spend so much time and care on someone who is 99 years old; why they don’t spend that time on younger patients who need it instead. Of course, we laughed when she told us and I asked if we should just send her out on an ice floe somewhere.

But as she waved good-bye to us from her fourth-floor room window while we pulled away in our convertible in the late day sunshine Saturday, we felt as if we were the ones who were floating away from our anchor, our home, our love, our Mira.

In a lifetime filled with good-byes, we are thankful for the ones that are only for the shortest of times. Those are the partings my heart can take these days.

Happy Thanksgiving. Hug hard and often. And know that I am grateful to you for letting me share our stories.