My mother, an artist, spoke eloquently the language of beauty.  She communicated it through her paintings and sculptures, yes, but throughout her entire realm, as well:  her home, her lovely appearance, even her handwriting.  We, her children, grew up embraced by beauty, nurtured by it, encouraged and applauded in our personal pursuit of creative arts: visual, musical, literary, dramatic, or decorative.  We were all fluent in the parlance of art as our family culture’s native tongue. 
  
Except for my dad.  A physicist, inventor, and business owner, he spoke in numbers.  Spreadsheets. Mathematics.  Art to him was the neat row of framed patents that lined his office wall.  His creativity flowed when he pulled the ubiquitous ballpoint pen from his breast pocket and grabbed a nearby napkin or receipt to sketch the genesis of his next product design. Preoccupied and peripheral at home, he of the left brain watched as his right-brained wife and progeny blossomed around him in a riotous garden of creative expression.  

The children grew up, moved out, had families of their own.  Over the many years, his mental acuity began to soften and fade.  Her artistic hands became stilled by arthritis.  Then one day, her gentle voice of beauty was heard no more. 

Artists use the term “negative space” to describe the area in a painting, photo, or sculpture where the subject is not. The background surrounds the subject and helps to define its shape.  Think of Michelangelo, chipping away the marble’s negative space to release the masterpiece trapped within. 

The passing of someone you love creates a negative space where they once were but are no longer. The absence may be palpable—as real and dynamic a thing as their presence ever was—and the negative shape can have an unforeseen, positive power to transform what remains. 

Without my mother and without his former mental prowess, my father began to put forth tiny tendrils of artistic expression into the void. He painted a picture of flowers, primitive and child-like, which I treasure. He led his pretty physical therapist in an impromptu walker-dance before giving her braid a playful tug with a laugh.  At a Dixieland concert, my dad couldn’t contain his kinetic delight in the upbeat tunes but played invisible drums and “conducted” with his gnarled hands until the last note sounded.  Beauty flourished in this surprising and sacred negative space.  So when the Creator’s whispered words of love fell gently onto the tilled, fertile soil of his heart, he understood and nodded simply, "Yes."      

See 10/14/2012 article in Long Term Care News

At nearly 10,000’ altitude, I had dropped far behind my fellow climbers, stopping every few steps up the mountain to let my pounding heart slow its frantic gallop. My walking sticks dragged behind me, tracing a drunken pattern in the dust as my shoulders stooped and my feet grew ever heavier.

Such was my painful first backpacking experience, five years ago. My husband and kids are avid backpackers, who go as often as adulthood allows. But I swore I would never attempt it again.  

So why was I kitting up for another trip the weekend before our anniversary?

Love.

After 30-plus years of marriage, we’re looking at retirement in the not-too-far-distant future. And I don’t care for the prospect of devolving into separate lives. I want to have some shared hobbies. He wants me to stay healthy and strong, around to enjoy them for as long as possible.  So I began exercising more diligently and mentioned that I might be open to considering a modest trek again. 

That’s all it took. Before I knew it, permits had been secured, supplies purchased, and equipment assembled. No such word as “tentative” exists in my husband’s vocabulary. 
 
As the date got closer, I started looking for excuses to bail out.  What about our business?  COVID? The drought?  He was undeterred.  

Two days before we were to leave, though, we received an email from the forest service, pulling our overnight permits due to the potential for fire.  My husband was disappointed. I managed to look sufficiently downcast and suppress the fist-pumps of relief.  

Still, we had reservations at a high-elevation hotel, which was to be our base for a couple days’ acclimation hikes.  It was the perfect solution, in my opinion. Hike by day; a shower, clean sheets, and warm meal at night.

We found a route that looked challenging but (possibly) do-able.  After a bumpy 40-minute off-road drive, we arrived at the trailhead.   

The path started out gently, through a beautiful forest. Then it got steeper. The uphill climbs were as brutal as I’d remembered and after a couple of hours, I was ready give up and turn back. Exhausted, I asked some hikers coming the opposite direction how far to the lake.

With halos visible only to me, they said, “You’re almost there. Maybe 10 minutes.” An end now in reach, I pushed on ahead until we saw sparking waters in the distance.

My husband found a soft place to sit on the banks of the lake with a convenient boulder backrest. No other hikers in sight, we paused to breathe in enjoyment with all our senses.  Pungent pine aroma.  Cool alpine water caressing my bare toes. Breezes whispering counterpoint to the chorus of a neighboring creek. The intense tang of hard cheese and sweet dried fruit. Brazen aspens, rustling their golden leaves like dancers’ coins. 
 
After we had returned to the hotel, my husband filled a cooler with trail grub and took me to a local park for a modified outdoor dinner, which he prepared with plastic dishes over a small camp stove as children played on the nearby swing set.  

Back in our room, we fell into a comfortable bed, where my man dreamed of the trail and challenges ahead, while I slipped into a contented and dreamless sleep.  

With its extreme joys and angst, new love gets all the media hype. But in the quiet confidence of long-time love, adventures still await.  
       

Oh, the cluelessness of youth. I cringe now.

In my defense, I didn’t have much context for understanding the aging process. My compact world consisted mostly of people who looked like me. I was Normal. My siblings and friends were Normal.  My grandparents were Old. My parents? Well, they were timeless, like a sequoia.

In the rare moments that I thought about the difference between the elderly and myself, I saw them as other. A separate species. The species of Old. You were either Old or you were Not Old. People who were Old had somehow always been Old.  That was their kind. In my robust ignorance, I could no more identify with their strange physical appearance than I could a mollusk or mole.    

As a young adult, I recall meeting a cheerful woman at church who had deep vertical lines on the left side of her face. Shocked, I thought, “How on earth did that happen? How could she have let herself get like that?”  I was sure she had made a conscious decision—or at least neglected a critical element of self-care—that allowed the wrinkles to form on one side of her face.
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Father, forgive me. After more than four decades behind a steering wheel, I now have vertical lines forming on the left side of my face, where the sun has beat down on it many more times as driver than passenger.  I can almost hear God chuckling. 
 
When my husband and I were newlyweds, our neighbor, Dolly, was an octogenarian who had never married. Shy and sweet, she always wore a tidy dress, faux pearls at her neck, and a snowy white up-do.  I sensed even then that Dolly was not old, but rather a young woman who had just lived a long time. 

My dad and I had many conversations about the issue of aging when he was in assisted living near my home. At 88 with encroaching memory loss, he looked in bemusement at his deteriorating body, wondering—as I had—what had happened.  
He spread his life-worn hands out before him, turning them this way and that. “I don’t feel old,” he observed.

No one does.

According to the Harvard Business Review (Your Messaging to Older Audiences Is Outdated, by Hal Hershfield and Laura Carstensen, July 2, 2021), “Most older people refer to ‘older people’ in the third person…they report feeling subjectively younger than they actually are. Seventy-year-olds report feeling as much as 15 to 20% younger than their chronological age.”

The reality is our bodies age gradually but inexorably. Even the most rigorous fitness and beauty regimen can only stave off the inevitable for a time. Yet inside, our spirits remain engaged, curious, vibrant. I believe that’s because we were designed for eternity; and as our bodies no longer look, work, or feel like they “should,” our soul leans into it, like a horse straining against bit and bridle towards home.  

In a quote (sometimes attributed to C.S. Lewis), author George Macdonald wrote, “Never tell a child, ‘You have a soul.’ Teach him, ‘You are a soul; you have a body.’ …The body is but the temporary clothing of the soul.”

Old, young, or somewhere in the messy continuum between, we can look into the eyes of another and connect to one like us. We’ll find beauty, kinship, and—perhaps—a hint of eternity.  

Shuttle driver.  Doctor.  Janitor.  Fellow resident.  Everyone who encountered my dad heard the same story.  

“I’ve got five great kids,” he’d boast, holding up his hand, fingers spread apart like exclamation marks.  “Four daughters,” he’d say, carefully folding the fingers over, leaving a hitchhiker’s thumb—missing half its nail since that last power tool incident— “and one son. Five great kids and not a lemon in the bunch!”  

If you lingered, he would slowly recite the names, sometimes struggling but never failing to come up with all five.  
   
Though he’s been gone for several years, my sister and I still marvel at the miracle of this man we call “New Dad.” 

The father we were more familiar with was driven:  a scientist and entrepreneur, always chasing the next invention that would make him a millionaire and silence the “never-good-enough” inner voice of the boy who grew up, literally, on the wrong side of the tracks. Other than the occasional memorable bout of paternal discipline, he left the child-rearing to our mother while he focused on business and loomed large but inaccessible in the periphery of domestic life.

It wasn’t until Alzheimer’s slowly and decisively shut the door on his ambitions that our dad was transformed—in the best way.   Stripped of his dreams, his car, home, health, and even his wife of 63 years, New Dad emerged with gradual acceptance, twinkle-eyed humor, and a buoyant love for family that rose like a submerged beach ball, impossible to keep down. 

Tragedy and redemptive beauty sometimes walk side-by-side.  When all else is lost, love remains, triumphant. 

“Do you want to include Anne’s granddaughter?” I asked, flipping to the next page of my mom’s well-worn address book.   
She shifted in her easy chair, trying to get a little more comfortable.   Addressing Christmas cards was quite a task.  
 
“No, she was just writing to be polite.   No need to add her to the list.” 

My mother was a prodigious correspondent.   All her life, she’d been faithful to remember family and friends’ special occasions with a note or card and to respond quickly—usually within a few days—whenever she received a letter.  In recent years, she’d embraced email, but now she was struggling to navigate the computer.   And her exquisite handwriting had grown shaky; nearly illegible.  

I’d volunteered to help address the cards and mail them for her, easing a burden that she still refused to relinquish.  

As we addressed the cards, I wanted so much to ask her about the names I recognized only vaguely.  Who were Marguerite and Jim?  How did we know the Fishman family?  Were we related to Lucille or was she a friend from bygone days?   There were stories, I was sure, for whom she was the only source: relationships which I wanted to learn of and hold close.  But, besides the real issue of her fatigue, asking those questions would have been an admission that she might not always be around with the answers.  And I firmly closed my mind’s door on that thought.
  
Before the next Christmas, she was gone.  And the stories, the relationships, the answers died with her.  As I slowly turned the pages of her address book, I grieved the loss of those friendships that she had so cherished.  I felt great sadness and regret for allowing my denial of her mortality to rob me of the opportunity to capture and carry forward precious memories and connections.  A future without my mother had been inconceivable.  I wish now I had had the courage to ask the delicate questions anyway. 
 
Because freedom from regret is an incomparable gift you can give yourself, today.   

The tension tumbles from her tiny, boney shoulders.  My mother, struggling from afflictions too many to count, still gives a beautiful smile of welcome and voices her concern for my well-being—not hers—whenever I come to visit.  Practical matters handled and conversation exhausted, I then gently massage her scalp with my fingers and watch her body go limp with delight.
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Before they moved to assisted living, our family cycled through a series of helpers to care for my mother and, on a basic level, for my father with Alzheimer’s. One day, I came over and found Crystal kneeling in front of my dad, her hands working a pumice stone vigorously to smooth his shockingly neglected feet—reminiscent of a Galilean who had once humbled Himself to tend the feet of His friends. 

I am fortunate to work with my husband, where we spend most of our day independently busy, even emailing from the next office to ask a quick question. From time to time, he’ll pause what he’s doing to come up behind me and massage my shoulders for a moment and I melt. Sometimes it is I who visits, dropping a kiss on the top of his head and sliding my hand gently along his arm in silent affection.
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When other languages of love come up short, never underestimate the power of touch.  A simple, caring touch can transcend words to speak love that goes straight to the heart.