When I started this blog, I was committed to keeping the overall balance of this blog on the lighter, happier moments and have been feeling less of those over the past few weeks.  But one serious bright spot was when I recently got tickets to take Mom to the symphony.  Mom has always loved music and various performing arts and when we moved in together I had made a mental commitment to take her about once a month to some sort of performance.  It’s one of the ways that I think that I can realistically give her a higher quality of life.  She appreciates watching and listening to things as it is increasingly difficult to think of the right word or string together the coherent idea that she wants.

Music is high of the list of things that she responds well to– mostly when I play CDs around the house.  So I expected that the symphony would be a hit.  It certainly was.  Mom actually sat there, so moved by the music that she waved her arms to the melody, as though she was conducting herself.  I had a few moments of feeling a bit awkward toward the other patrons and then decided that this was a moment when I was grateful for only being able to afford the cheap seats in the back!  There was no one near us so I let Mom wave her arms in the tune to the entire symphony.  She loved it.  And I was grateful to be able to give her something that brought her that much joy.