Beautiful meditation on love and suffering

Here are some excerpts of a post at Patheos by Sherry Antonetti I hope you go read in full:

My father has Alzheimer's. It keeps him from saying everything he thinks, sometimes in mid-sentence, but we still get occasional puns and stories that our hearts gobble like truffles. Often his deepest communication, though, is non-verbal: the smile that says, "I know you" from across the room. It is enough.
My three-year-old has Down syndrome. When the rest of the world hears, "Ahhh. Rahh!" I know it means, "the dogs next door should come out so I can bark at them." Jumping up and down at the end of the driveway is his way of saying, "the bus is late and I want to go to school." Most of his communication is non-verbal; his actual words strike the heart. He says "IRUVYOU" at bedtime. He nods his head when we repeat it. It may never get clearer, but it's there and he means it with his whole heart. It is enough.
-snip[
Because Alzheimer's can make my father absent, we are forced to be more present. When he sings snips of "The Wild Rover" and other favorites, those songs take on greater meaning. Watching him remember the rosary, the rhythms of the mass even as his brain is forgetting, these things stay in our hearts. While it is a long hard process, this dying, if we were impatient with death, we would forfeit time loving him, time we could be singing.
Similarly, at mass no one sings the Alleluia like my son. When the cantor begins, he chimes in. Sometimes he doesn't finish when she does and the church echoes with his joy. He's singing the Alleluia the way we're supposed to pray. His song-shy siblings sometimes join his choir. In his absence, fewer Alleluias would ring out.
-snip-
Suffering is always an opportunity for grace but only after it has been picked up and embraced. The real goal of life is to keep expanding the heart, to grow it outward, for the life of the world.