Happy

Every Wednesday for around the last ten years, my mother and father picked up my cousin Kathy from the nursing home she’s lived in since her adopted mother died. They took her to lunch, to give her a break from the nursing home food and give her a chance to people-watch. Kathy has Downs syndrome, and also suffered from spinal meningitis as a child. She was never expected to live past thirty. She is 53 now.

Since my father died, I’ve been trying to maintain the same routine. Kathy can’t really speak (or at least, none of us really understand her language). She can, however, brighten your day in a way that is just immeasurable. Kathy is blessed with a sort of happiness that I don’t think many people can imagine. She waves and says hi to everyone she meets in her own special way to everyone, and seems so genuinely happy. It’s almost disconcerting sometimes, because she will look at you for a long time, and then begin to laugh. You know she’s really happy when you hear that laugh.

Kathy likes pictures. She tears them out of magazines and keeps them in photo albums. For some reason, she likes pictures of athletes, and dark-skinned men the best. She arranges and rearranges her pictures until they are so tattered and torn that they have to be replaced, tearing away little scraps to get just the parts she wants. When you point a camera at her, she immediately thinks that it is serious business and clams up to look serious. It took a while to really capture her smile. I’m not sure why, unless it’s because most of the faces she sees in pictures aren’t smiling.

It is impossible to be in a bad mood around Kathy. It will make me sad when I won’t be able to visit her as frequently, due to the pressures of school. Kathy always reminds me how precious life is, and how good it is to be alive.