Keep Your Happiest Face Up

As many of you know, my mom has been residing in an assisted living facility for the past several years. Thus, my sister, brothers and I have not been able to visit her since early March. Although my mom is a bit peeved by the persistence of the coronavirus, she has adjusted to the changes surprisingly well. We've all been writing letters, sending (or dropping off) care packages, and calling more often. During one phone call early on in the pandemic, Mom and I had been talking about the many ways the virus was interrupting our lives and plans. Maybe I was showing more frustration than I meant to because at the end of the conversation, she said, “Well, honey, keep your happiest face up." I laughed and said I'd try. Then I said what I always say at the end of a call: "I love you, Mom," and she said, "I love you too, more than you know." 

Thanks to the patient supervision of the thoughtful workers at her facility, we've also been able to FaceTime with her, something that we'd never done before. One of the interesting aspects of the collision between FaceTime and early dementia is that to my mom, the FaceTime visits seem like actual in-person visits. "Be sure to take your book with you when you leave today, honey," she told me one day, and then she said, "I'm so glad I got up there to see Ben and Becca's new house" (which she’s seen only on a FaceTime tour my son and his wife gave her).

The FaceTime visits, mail, and phone calls have undoubtedly contributed to the way my mom has adapted to this new normal, but I wonder if her resilience is also a product of having lived a long time and seen a lot of hard things. She was born in 1932, right in the middle of the Great Depression. In the turbulent 1960s, she was a young wife and mother.  By the time she retired from teaching in the early 1990s, she had lived through wars, recessions, political and social unrest, and disease outbreaks from tuberculosis and polio to measles and whooping cough. She was just shy of seventy years old on 9/11, and now here she is at 87, weathering a pandemic, the likes of which, none of us has seen before. 

As she has always done my whole life, she is still setting a wise example for me. I see her carrying on, finding joy and peace in doing the things she's always loved that she can still do: reading, coloring, writing letters, caring for the plants on her windowsill, praying for her family and friends, and drinking coffee. She is holding on tight to her faith and keeping her happiest face up. I love you, Mom, more than you know.