I wanted to share a sweet story about my MIL as a reminder to myself to the grab the moment.

My MIL stays with us every third weekend. As most of you know, she suffers from lung cancer (a slow growing type but untreatable) and Alzheimer's. To be honest, it's the Alzheimer's that's more of a day-to-day concern than the cancer. It's what affects her quality of life in a more obvious way.

After the scare we had last winter when she was living with us (while we were at work) a family decision was made for her to live with my retired sister-in-law and her husband so that there can always be someone present. She is longer able to be left alone.

The Alzheimer's is progressing, as it does, to where there are more bad days than good. Bad days involve no memories of family, recognition of where she is, or means to care for herself. She often becomes quite aggressive on those days due to fear and frustration and it is hard to deal with emotionally for family. We remind ourselves that it is the disease behaving this way, not Phyllis.

But yesterday was a gift.

I picked Phyllis up in the morning after getting groceries and I could tell by the light in her eyes and perkiness in her step, that she was having a rare lucid day. We dropped the groceries off for DH to put away while we squirrelled off to do some shopping. She wanted to get some toiletries, go to the bank, pick up a bottle of wine for dinner, that sort of thing. We had a lovely time ending with a stop at Starbuck's and some great conversation.

After dinner, we played a couple of games of Scrabble and she whooped both hubby and me. The woman was always brilliant at word games. But after Scrabble we could tell she was starting to fade into a less clear state of mind and began to talk of her youth. She loved to dance when she was a teenager/young woman and started to hum some Dean Martin and Mills Brothers tunes. We still had a large box of her vinyl albums here from when she lived with us and little did she know that DH had purchased at our neighbourhood pawn shop, an old portable record player a few weeks ago for when she's with us. As she was humming in the kitchen clearly in her own thoughts and time period now and no longer with us in 2015, hubby went and grabbed the record player.

I pushed the living furniture all against the walls and created a clear space in the middle of the room. Mike (my hubby) put on a Mills Brothers record and came and asked his mother to dance. As they twirled around the living room, the smile on her face became wider and wider as she was transported into another moment in time. She kept calling my husband by the name of Henry and asking him about his service in WWII but he didn't correct her, he just kept dancing and nodding and telling her she was beautiful. I cried while watching them.

When she got up this morning, Phyllis was confused, angry and extremely combative. The joy and tenderness of the previous day was gone. But at least we had yesterday.

Life truly is Carpe Diem.