THE CAREGIVERS ARPEGGIO, BIRTHDAY EDITION: Music’s broken chord, the arpeggio, occurs when notes normally played simultaneously are played individually. Anyone taking care of someone with a physical or mental ailment knows the difficulty of dealing with brokenness of what once was together. Tomorrow, April 25th is my mom’s 84th birthday, & one of those arpeggiated days. I know it’s her birthday, but will she? As the ominous nature of dementia plays hide & seek with her memory, for how long will she remember & is this the last one she’ll remember or is this the last one? And there’s no handbook, no seminar, no St. Christopher in a pocket, no nothing to help deal with the raw, the unfiltered reality of the unknown. There’s no halftime for mending bruises & pep talks, no pause to press grief into freeze frame, no clear fairy tale dawn at the end of a dark & stormy night, survival’s triumph being shrunk down to the lowest denominator of today ending simply no worse than yesterday. There aren’t many substitutes from the bench either. Just family, all of ‘em if you’re blessed by God with a tribe like mine, & if you’re rolling in four leaf clovers, some family with different last names. Mostly though, it comes down to you against the weight, the unfairness, the exhaustion, the easy advice of armchair musicians that haven’t read or played your sheet music, with not grand acts of resilience or bravery but the simple act of staring in the mirror & telling the reflection to not wave the white flag of surrender & keep going, to summon your grit to fight the symptoms of humanity & whatever disease is the foe, to that place where none of us know who we are until we are challenged, until we are taken to the deep & dark recesses where the lights of faith & hope & will & determination shine faintly. But through the difficulty, through the distress & through the pain, we must ride the darkness & respond & celebrate birthdays, holidays, a random Thursday, & play each chord, no matter if simultaneously or in arpeggio… & Happy Birthday Mom!