A Glimpse of Life After

As I stood out on our deck this morning basking in the cool before the heat descended, I overheard my mom teaching The Girl how to play Go Fish through her open bedroom window. It was a lovely bit of eavesdropping full of grandmotherly love, 3-year old exuberance and a sense of normality which has been absent from just about everything lately.

The kids have been really sweet with my mom. We told them she was sick and so they had to be very gentle with her. The Girl laid down with her to take a nap yesterday. The Boy loves that she’s here every afternoon when he gets out of summer school bearing new artwork to hang on the wall in her bedroom. And they both love that she’s teaching them Go Fish. Nana not being able to get rowdy with them per the usual course is giving them a chance to really just be with each other and enjoy one another’s company, which is so wonderful for me to get to watch.

We took mom to the doctor today to have her angio site checked and The Boy dutifully pushed her wheelchair into the office so she didn’t have to work too hard. The Girl asked sweetly afterwards if Nana was still ok. And then I drug us all to the grocery store as we had close to zero food in the house except for Cheerio’s, marshmallows and tinned turkey.

It was a bordering on normal kind of day. It was a reminder for all of us that while mom is currently a bit on the fragile side that she’s still Nana. It was a chance to see past the trauma and into the present of healing and progress. It was a chance to look forward and imagine when I didn’t have to keep her from picking up her grandchildren or remind her to take her meds or take her blood pressure twice a day or memorize all of her medications or repeat the same terrifying story time after time.

It was a chance to see, a mere 5 days afterwards, that there is and will be life after my mom’s heart attack.