I walked into the lobby of Berks Heim as mom napped, on my way out after feeding her lunch. She wasn’t awake for long, so I figured there was no reason to sit and watch her sleep some more.
There they were. Always there, on the couch in the front foyer of the main entrance. Like on prom night, cuddled up together in each other’s arms, gazing into each other’s eyes.
They are a husband and wife spending every moment together in some amazingly real love cocoon. Every time I leave, they are there, holding each other. Just sitting, staring in the same direction. I smiled at them today as I always do. The older gentleman smiled back and said hello. “How are you today?” I inquired. “Oh, just fine,” he smiled back as I walked past. One of them lives there from what I can tell. The other comes to visit daily and they spend their time pinned together on that couch. Like they own it. Like no one else could do it justice.
I doubt anyone could.
I smiled and fought back a tear as I walked out to the crisp, cool March afternoon. The love they have between them is an amazing picture of beauty, of being at the end of life and holding on to what’s perfect.
Resilience isn’t in everyone’s vocabulary. Some people find the breakdown easier than the rebuild. There seems to be solace sometimes in the letting go, the falling apart…. the excuses and reasons to just give up in that moment. We all have them, we all do it. It’s human nature to feel sorry for ourselves sometimes. And those moments are probably just as important so we can thrive in the triumph over adversity, in the beauty of turning the bad to good.
My team has had its fair share of adversity, of the hard and the bad…of the loss and the injury, on and off the field. And through it all, I have watched some amazing things happen.
What excites me the most is the fact that there is solace and peace even in losing. And I am not even talking about on the field. We have gone through so much off the field, in our every day lives, that I realize softball is secondary to what is happening here.
Life is unfolding in ways that sometimes we just don’t even understand. We fall down. We get up. We find the courage to do it all over again, regardless of how many times it takes, how many scrapes and burns we tend to. We build stronger bonds. We find ties that we can’t unravel. We hold the rope. For each other and ourselves. We make the mistakes count. And we stop counting the mistakes. We fall down. Again. We get up. Again. And through it all, we find a beauty we can’t match in anything else we do.
We look for it, but we just don’t see it in others.
The times of real gentleness are the ones we grab hold of. We don’t let go.
We, too, wrap our arms around each other and smile. We are more than “just fine” today.
We bounce back, stronger, better, and with more love in our hearts than before.
We welcome it. We don’t back down when the fire gets hot. We hold the rope. We hold the rope.
We hold the rope.
There’s a beauty in resilience.
