Here’s what I have noticed about being sad lately: there are moments of almost heart-wrenching sweetness that happen, even against the backdrop of uncertainty.

I am home again from visiting my mother in Florida, and I know that she is in a gray-colored room in a skilled nursing facility and that she is scared from her diagnosis of terminal cancer and wishing that I was back there with her, sitting on the bed, rubbing her back, telling her funny stories, bringing her cups of tea.

Instead of me, there are other people who are there with her, who are offering her kindness. Peggy, her neighbor in the senior housing complex, every day brings my mother’s little dog for a visit, and he curls up in my mother’s bed and goes to sleep on her arm, waking up only to offer a half-hearted “grr” when somebody comes over to the bed.

The nurses–most of them big, burly guys with tattoos and deep voices–take my mother outside with them to smoke, and once outside, they tell her their life stories. It’s only been three days, but when I call her, I can tell that she’s just been in the middle of a major chat with someone she never met before.

One day I called and she was in the middle of trading astrological stories with the night nurse–explaining that in our family, just about everybody is a Taurus, and how difficult this can be when all these bull-types have different opinions. The night nurse said his family members are all Scorpios, and, while I was on the phone, they had a moment of wondering who would win in a fight: bulls or scorpions.

“What do YOU think?” my mother finally asked me.

I think she has a renewed interest in life, is what I think. Each day when I talk to her, I hear in her voice something that is a little stronger and more sure of herself.

I feel stronger, too. We talk on the phone about all kinds of things. There’s a Frankie Laine song she wants me to download for her and send her. We’re talking about whether she’ll be strong enough to go back to her own apartment after she’s done with rehab…and some of the ladies in the apartment complex have said they’ll help her with meals and with driving her places she needs to be.

She could be back among her own things again. It’s possible she has more time than we think.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said to me today on the phone, “but knowing that I’m going to die soon has made me realize a lot of things I didn’t know before. I’m calmer than I thought I would be, and the food tastes good.”

Yesterday I sat outside a coffee house with Stephanie and Allie and little Miles, and drank pineapple-flavored iced tea and ate a cranberry-oatmeal cookie, and watched people walk by on a Brooklyn street for hours and hours. It was such a beautiful day, and my daughters’ voices were animated and happy. We shared a cookie and watched the people. The catalpa trees shed their white blossoms on us, which reminded me of a poem I couldn’t quite remember the words to.

We walked back to the house where Stephanie will be housesitting all summer, a beautiful brownstone in a quiet, shady neighborhood. Later, my husband and Allie’s husband met us, and we ate dinner–fried chicken, mashed potatoes, collard greens, biscuits, and key lime pie–in a little outdoor restaurant in a little back patio where the strings of white lights twinkled in the dusk. The baby looked around in wonder and did not cry once.

There are these beautiful moments that still go on, in which I feel such a mixture of happiness and gratitude, and I know they are sitting right next to the sadness, which is squatting quietly, biding its time, knowing it has its weapons but that it won’t win out after all.