Revisiting the sliding glass doors

The path of awareness...

 I’m at the age when I’m losing a lot of my friends. All of us will go through it. Each time it happens, I sit back for a moment and recall those times, those flashbacks, if you will, like when I walked down the hallway in high school with that special friend, or later in life, sat in the dugout and had a brief conversation with a teammate, or, more times than not, shuffled through the morning paper and discovered I had lost another friend.

Like most people, I thank my lucky stars that I’m still here, still around to savor those “special moments” with the friends I have left…and my loved ones who are still with us.

Four years ago, I pushed a button and waited patiently for a caregiver to open up a sliding glass door, allowing me to enter the memory care unit of which my mother was a resident. I would always take a deep breath and enter a world where all the patients had a hard time remembering those special moments in their life.

I remember walking the long corridor outside my mother’s room. There were close to forty residents on the first floor of the center and each one of them had a square wooded cabinet hanging on the wall just outside their door. Inside the cabinet, were pictures and keepsakes, noting the resident’s “special moments” in their life. Some of the photos dated back to the 1950s, the 1940s, the 1930s, and in some cases the 1920s.

Every time I prepared to leave the facility, I waited for a caregiver to hustle over and unlock the sliding glass door. I would then walk into the sunlight and look up at the blue sky. I would then take a deep breath and thank my lucky stars that I could escape to the world I lived in…the world away from the sliding glass door.

I lost my mother in April of 2018, and I would never enter through those sliding glass doors again. I would never see her again. I often wonder what window of opportunity is still out there for me and how long will I be able to avoid such sliding glass doors?

At one point, in 2015, my mother lived in the same facility, but on the fourth floor, long before Alzheimer’s had raised its ugly head and not only took away her walks outside the sliding glass door but her beautiful view of the mountains from her balcony.

The move to the first floor was inevitable.

As I close in on another decade of my life, I cherish every view, every walk in the park, and every free moment I have left in this world. The final view outside my window will come soon enough.

But it is time to honor not only my mother but all the beautiful people that have left this world. I learned a lot from inside that sliding glass door.

One of the most important things is to continue to enjoy the view and stay away from the sliding glass doors as long as you can. Look back in time if you must, but for all the right reasons.

Enjoy the moment. The next day is a view worth waiting for.