My mom is a Lobby Napper. This is a good thing. An amazing, answer to prayer, hand-to-Jesus good thing. Last Saturday, my sister and I walked into my mom’s building to check in on her, and she was sitting in the lobby with her gang of friends (yes, she has a gang of friends. This falls under the category of “Miracles Answered”) napping happily away in the lobby couches around the fireplace.
Let me reiterate why this is so important: it means she is comfortable and secure. She has friends. She has settled in to this new phase of her life. This. Is. Huge.
For the first few months of my mom’s transition into Belmont, she would call me and/or or my sister up to 18 times a day. 18 TIMES A DAY. She was scared and unsure, and her only foundation to connect with something that she knew to be true was Christi or me. Alzheimers is a progressive, one-way disease. There are times when she asks where my dad is and she may leave notes for him if we go out so he won’t worry about her. 
She thinks that her mother and father and husband all died on the same day. She often thinks that I’m her cousin instead of her daughter and she thinks she can talk to the birds outside. (Since I don’t speak Bird, who am I to say they don’t understand?) She’s not going to get better and she’s not going to go back to being the mom I grew up with.
But a year ago, to this day, I was going into surgery to repair my shoulder after falling out of my car while vomiting from carsickness. Within the space of 5 months, I’d torn my labrum, my father died, my sister and I moved into my mom’s house, and I was about to spend Spring Break recovering from shoulder surgery. Today, when I went to see her after school, she was sitting with her friends at dinner, eating a cheeseburger & happily chatting about newspapers. Her conversations often don’t make sense … but they don’t have to. She’s happy. She’s content. She’s well cared for by the staff at Belmont Village.
I say all this to my friends who I know are going through hard times. They. Will. Pass. They will get better.
I’ve been listening to the Harry Potter audiobooks since Thanksgiving as a way to cope – okay, escape – what I knew would be a difficult holiday season. I’m not overselling it when I say Harry Potter got me through. I found escapism that I was expecting and wisdom that I wasn’t. I discovered truths about myself by reading the words in the characters of JK Rowling.
That’s me. That’s been me for many many years – scarred by my own thoughts and misconceptions and insecurities.
The descriptions of Harry trying to cope after the death of Dumbledore mirrored my own feelings after my dad died. It felt like – still feels like on some days – that the grief comes out of nowhere and knocks me flat.
All of this is to say to my friends that are going through their own hard times – because we’re all going through our own hard times of some form or another – that you are not alone. You will get through this. And it will get better.
I ran a 5K last weekend. A year ago, 5 years ago, 20 years ago I wouldn’t have thought I would even want to run a 5K, let alone enter & finish one. But here I am. I’m on the other side of a really difficult period in my life, and I’m doing okay. That means that you can get on the other side too. You are not defined by this period in your life; you are bigger than the hard times.
And if you need a coping mechanism, I highly recommend Harry Potter. Seriously.