Reminded of...

I was cleaning out emails at work recently and I happened upon a conversation I had with my friend Lindsay. We email each other daily, sometimes to make plans, sometimes to vent about things going on in our lives, but more often than not, just to say good morning to each other. It’s a nice little constant to have and a ritual I've come to cherish. This particular thread I happened upon was from June of 2013, what seems like a lifetime ago. Dad was over six months into post stroke life and had been home from the skilled nursing facility Stillwater for just about two months. I won’t bore anyone with the details of what amounted to a non-riveting conversation, except to say that the thing I took away from reading it was the recognition of a snapshot of a specific time and place. I wrote about how I purchased corn for dinner, how I had forgotten how much Dad liked it and how much of it he had eaten the night before. It was evident by the retelling of this to my friend that I was tickled pink about this fact. At the time we were still trying to get Dad back into eating food on a consistent basis. Hell, he was still drinking stuff like Ensure to build up his weight. And that's the thing, in June 2013 it was all still new. Everything was so new. Not new as in a new romance, a new job, moving to a new place, getting a new car, things like that. It was a different new, albeit edge of your seat, don’t know what’s going to happen every morning I wake up, but hey Dad is still alive, breathing and able to remain at home, so everything’s OK kind of exciting and new. 

I was reminded of the movie The Sweet Hereafter. While the film has far too many layers to go into, the title references the feeling and the life after a tragedy. A small Canadian village lives through a horrific school bus accident and comes out the other side to what is known and called the sweet hereafter. They are transformed from the time before, something that no longer exists and will never exist again, to an acceptance and almost reverence about the time after, the reality of their lives. The nature of life.   

On almost the eve of Dad's stroke, two years ago, I am reminded of the sweet hereafter we are all living in now. Even after a tragic event, there is something to take away, even if it's a small thing, like having corn, you know your Dad loves, with dinner.