As I visited our 99-year-old Henrietta Welch at Ridgewood nursing home today, I spotted this partly-constructed puzzle on one of the tables in the lobby, and there was something about the bright colors and the big “NICE” at the top of it which really caught my eye – and I just had to snap this picture. There are probably several sermons just waiting to be written out of this colorful image… maybe that We’re Not Done Being Nice ….. or There Are Many Pieces to Niceness ….. or There’s nothing Bland about being Nice ….. or To be Nice, it helps to build a good framework. But on the most basic level, this puzzle symbolized for me the effort of people trying to make the best of it …. and beyond that, trying to have some fun. There are plenty of such puzzles in nursing homes and hospitals that are up on shelves in their boxes, gathering dust – and I would wager that some of them have never been out of the box. So to see the unmistakable evidence that someone had taken this puzzle off of the shelf and was working on it was downright inspiring.
So was the smile which greeted me when I went into the dining room to find Henrietta, who at 99 years old is still sharp as a tack. The moment she caught sight of me she called out “Greg!” with a big smile on her face and thanked Kathy and me for the flowers which we had sent her while she was in the hospital. Henrietta has always been made of sturdy stuff – You had to be to accomplish all that she has in her long and remarkable life – and she is not about to let something as silly as a serious upper respiratory infection keep her down for long.
Still, it was a relief to find her in such good spirits, because at the age of 99 it has to be harder than ever for her to soldier on through the relentless encroachment of age, illness, disease and plain and simple exhaustion. . . and I am resigned to the very real possibility that someday I may walk into her room and find that the vibrant woman I have admired for so long will no longer be there – or won’t be at all the same person – or will be but a diminished, faint shell of who she was. But for now, she is still Henrietta, through and through. . . and although she very much wants to be back home, she is smart enough to know that she needs to be where she is right now- and she’s grateful for everything that the good folks at Ridgewood are doing to usher her along the long road of recovery. And if Henrietta can look on her situation so positively- and summon up the strength to rise above it and recover, then most of the rest of us can do the same thing.
By the way, if you were to approach the table where Henrietta and two other women were seated in their wheel chairs, waiting for supper, you would have assumed that they were just three harmless little old ladies. Only if you knew Henrietta would you know that she was a public school music teacher for over forty years….. doing some of her first teaching in a one-room school house where she had to shovel coal into the furnace….. before moving on to Racine and earning a sterling reputation as one of the finest high school orchestra directors in this part of the country, and one of only a tiny handful of women doing that at the time. All of that is in the fairly distant past now, but it doesn’t change the fact that she did all that- and chances are that anyone you see in such a rest home has a far more interesting story than you might ever imagine. I can only hope that the people who live in such places find it in their hearts to push beyond the most mundane matters of everyday life and at least occasionally ask the people they are serving about the life they lived before rest homes and wheel chairs and catheters. Chances are that it’s a much more interesting story than they would ever imagine.
By the way, Henrietta’s cheerful greeting to me was echoed when I swung by All Saints Hospital to visit my dear friend Walter, who has had a terribly tough time of it over the last several weeks- contending not just with his MS, but with pneumonia…. and grieving the death of his beloved dad. When I walked into his hospital room today, I didn’t know quite what to expect – so the smile on his face was the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in a long time. But beyond his good cheer, it was wonderful to hear such perfect clarity as he recounted all he has been through recently, including two- and-a-half week period that might be described as a Heavy Fog. Walter has come through all that with a new and profound appreciation for something that most of us take completely for granted: the gift of simple awareness. And it serves as one more reminder that if there is a central disguised blessing in the difficult road which Walter (and Lynn) have had to travel over the last few years, it is how they see the simplest things in life as the precious blessings that they are.
And I find myself newly grateful for the inspiring people in my life who face life’s challenges so bravely and with such grace. . . people like Walter and Henrietta, or our good friend Jack Potter (Kate’s dad) who has just undergone incredibly complex and serious heart surgery and who faces a long, hard climb back. But his amazing family is with him through all this and I know that his faith and vibrant love of life will carry him far. And isn’t it in the long, hard climb that we see with new clarity what life is all about- and who we are and what precious gifts we’ve been given?