The last time

You had your last time to drive a car or read a book or solve a crossword puzzle. You've already knitted your last sock and sewn your last button and made your last pie crust. And today was your last day to go to the Symphony.

For the past fifty years, you’ve been worshipping at churches without musical instruments, but that wasn't always your regular Sunday routine. During the more than twenty years at the beginning of your life, you went to a little Nazarene church where you would hear the piano accompanying the hymns and eventually you would play in the song service. And because of that, I always thought you somehow heard the phantom echoes of a tinkling piano each time we sang a hymn. Standing up during a song, I would see your fingers play an imaginary keyboard on the back of the pew in front of us, your slender fingers designed for a pianist tapping along with the notes you sang in your bright soprano.

But today, when you went downtown to the grand auditorium to hear Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5, your humming and rocking distracted the people around you. After the hubbub of intermission, things only got worse. The man in front of you told you to be quiet, so you left and you won’t go back. It’s just one more thing this disease has taken from you.

Sometimes we see the “last times” coming around the corner on the eve of big events, like the night before getting married or moving to a new place or graduating. If you’re in the right frame of mind, you pause as you realize that it’s the last time to lock the front door or walk down that particular hallway. But there are other times when you might not know you’re living through your last time.

So, for whatever time we have left with you, I want to stop and mark the end of something, even if it’s painful. I want to celebrate the things that made who you were, maybe deep down who you still are. You can still love music, but your fingers don’t remember how to play the notes on the piano which is gathering dust in your den, the one your piano teacher gave you a lifetime ago. It’s also the piano you used to play for us so that we could dance around the living room, picturing ourselves as graceful ballerinas even though we were mostly just three clumsy, little girls with active imaginations.

As we try to navigate this new world with you so altered, we feel like those same clumsy, little girls but without the imagined gracefulness. We’re unsure of our roles and how best to help. For now, we rejoice that you’re happy to see us and that you say over and over how much you love us. So turn up the volume on Tchaikovsky or Bach or Karen Carpenter, for that matter, and hum into the sunshine, because we don't know how many sunny days we have left.