I have been thinking a lot about my parents since coming back from Michigan two weeks ago. Even settling back into our home, a missionary bio I am reading indirectly references them by talking about events at their church right after they married.

Mom and Dad met in high school at 14. As he describes it now, “I had one date and it lasted 70 years.” Mom died at 84 of dementia in 2021. The pandemic kept me from seeing her between June of 2019 and August of 2021, two months before she died.

Dad tenderly took care of Mom always, but especially during those dementia years. She went to the memory unit at their retirement village but, even during the COVID pandemic, Dad managed to see her many hours almost every day by signing up (and getting qualified) as her hospice care giver. There was one bleak period when he was not allowed in for about six weeks but Dad got the nurses to bring her to a fenced patio where someone made a six foot long hand which Dad would put through the fence for Mom to hold as he held the other end and spoke with her.

Dad was Mom’s prince.

When I was young in Grand Rapids, Michigan’s second largest city, there were only a few cultural institutions for us to visit. The Civic Auditorium, the John Ball Park Zoo, and, eventually, the Roger B. Chaffee Planetarium, after Chaffee, a local man, became a hero when Apollo I burned on the launch pad in Cape Canaveral in 1967, killing Chaffee and his two fellow astronauts.

So I have to believe the zoo, where we three kids spent so many happy times in our childhood, must have been important to our parents before we came along.

Now Dad tells me he just visited the zoo with Terry, widow of my mom’s cousin Norm. Terry, like Dad, tenderly cared for a dying spouse for many months. Since she is family, from my parents’ church (the church organist for 40 years), and lives in the same retirement village my parents chose, she and Dad have become close friends and are now dating. It is so sweet. I am sure, as we joke, Mom and Norm have given their approval from Heaven.

The picture is of my beautiful mom, one of the last days we spent together after she realized she had dementia but could still interact well with us.