RBS

“Thank you for today,” she said. “I had such a wonderful time!”

She started saying that somewhere in her nineties, and we heard her say it occasionally well beyond her hundredth birthday.

I assumed those words came from a long-ago memory pattern. Yet that line always came in an appropriate context.

Early on, “Thank you for today,” she’d say with a smile, “I had such a wonderful time!” after we’d taken her somewhere outside of her Assisted Living Apartment or her Nursing Home.

As her ability to go on such outings decreased, she would say that sentence when we’d been with her for a special event like a concert at her facility.

Eventually she would still express her excitement and gratitude with those same words even after something as simple as fast food Happy Meal in the lobby.

She was my mom.

Ruth Morgan Baldwin Neber Scheets is how her full name appears on her tombstone. From those five names, the initials she used as a monogram or a signature were simply RBS.

Her body gave out and she died two years ago today at age 105.

Probably the first thing she said on the other side of eternity was some variation of “Thank you for today; I had such a wonderful time!”