I didn’t know if we could jam 10 helium balloons into my little Mazda but we did, along with all the other makings of an 86^th birthday celebration for my mother. We drove up to the entrance of the Inn where my mother had a room in the memory unit, opened all the car doors and the hatch back and began unloading. As we carried our first armload to the door a friendly old gent with a walker greeted us on his way out,  re-activating the button for the automatic doors to let us through.

Two minutes later we were back out for the next load only to discover the balloons were gone.  I was bewildered. How on earth would they have unwedged themselves and broken free? It was such a tight fit. Even if they had somehow escaped, they would have floated up and gathered under the roof of the carport.

I suddenly had a wild thought that the man in the walker had taken them. He was the only one around. I automatically looked down the driveway, sure I would see the culprit, but there was no sight of him. This made no sense because no way would he have been able to walk all the way to the end of the drive in that amount of time. This was definitely suspicious. So where did he go? Reflexively, I walked out from under the carport and looked up, half expecting to see him in the sky, floating up, up, up like his time had come and the balloons were his transport home. I was half hoping that to be so because what a fine way to go.

I turned back to my partner, Gary, and shrugged. There was nothing to be done but go on with the party, minus ten red balloons. When we told everyone the story Leo, my 3-year-old grandson, couldn’t get over it. He kept saying, “But where did they go, Mimi?” After the party he asked again as we wheeled my mother back to her room. It was still on his mind as I buckled him into his car seat. “But Mimi, where did they go? They have to be somewhere.” This was not aligning with his sense of the order of the universe which he was beginning to piece together.

I know what he means. It is hard to wrap your mind around where things go when they are gone, especially people. For the ones I’ve lost, I’ve spent a lot of time looking up at the sky because I don’t know where else to look. Gary’s theory is that the older we get, the faster time goes, and at the very point we reach the end of our life we are traveling at the speed of light and become light itself.

I will go with that.

To my mother and to all the other luminaries we have all loved and lost.

E

Afterword: I have written about my mother and her experience with Parkinson’s a lot over the years. She wanted me to “write for the disabled” and speak to her experience and I have attempted to. After living with Parkinson’s for a good 20+ years, my mother died this past Sunday at age 91, two and a half weeks after we celebrated her 91^st birthday. While our world shook Sunday and will be forever changed without my mother, we are at peace knowing she has finally, finally been released. She was far stronger than she looked and lasted far longer than anyone thought possible, one more way she amazed us.