My 89-year-old Mom is on a long journey of decline.

That may seem like a gloomy way to start a post.

Yet in fact, this is a hopeful and cheerful post that absolutely must start, paradoxically, on such a somber note.

It must begin there because when the topic at hand is coping with old age, sickness and  death, what other note can you start on?

But where you start shouldn’t dictate where you end.

And this post ends on a note of absolute joy, I promise.

So dear reader, please read on …

For the past six years, since my Dad died, my Mom has been living at an “independent living” facility for elders in southeast Minnesota.

At first, she was able to live on her own, but as her memory and mental functioning dimmed, we had to hire caregivers to stay with her all day.

With Mom, the big risk is wandering. She’s blessed with good physical health and so, on any given morning, even at 89, she generally wants to be up and about and going on walks. She’s been this way all her life. She loves nothing more than simply walking down the street to see whatever she sees, to savor whatever the universe offers up for inspection, especially the bounty of nature, flowers and trees and clouds.

Which is great, but at this point in her life, if unattended, Mom will set out on a walk and within minutes will be lost. The wide open miracle of nature will suddenly become a darkened, menacing maze. After the first time she got lost in this way, and was returned to the independent-living facility by a policeman, we hired a full-time caregiver. For the past year or so, the arrangement has worked well. The caregiver arrives at 8 a.m., when Mom usually wakes up, and she leaves at 8 p.m., when Mom usually heads to bed to read or sleep.

But recently, things have changed. As Mom gets older, a process that seems to speed up after a certain point, her sense of time, especially of waking and sleeping, becomes increasingly deranged. A few weeks ago, she was reported wandering the independent facility late at night, confused and aimless and without a caregiver. The facility, of course, is responsible for her safety and so naturally worries that one evening Mom might slip out and face real danger. It was suggested that Mom now needs a caregiver to spend all evening with her, as well as all day. But the expense and the hassle makes that option impossible.

So, my two brothers and I started looking at “memory care” facilities for Mom. These are locked wards where elderly people, who are physically quite robust but have failing mental skills, are protected from wandering and getting lost. The better memory care units are designed and staffed by specialists who’ve mastered the particular set of skills to help elders with such needs.

My Mom and I and my brother Bruce visited a memory care facility this week.

And, it wasn’t half bad. No, let me rephrase that. It was thrilling. It was liberating. When I walked through this memory care ward, I became absolutely filled with joy.

But how could a locked ward for senile elders be liberating, for heaven’s sake?

But it was, it was, it was. So let me explain. I have an inkling that I learned something important this week about transforming fear into love.

So here’s what happened. The memory care ward is appended to a larger, independent living facility. There’s a sign by the door that opens into the ward, which reads “Bandel Hills.” That’s a neighborhood in my town, Rochester, Minnesota, so right there, we feel like we aren’t going into a “locked ward” but instead into a neighborhood where we will see friends, family, familiar faces, neighbors.

Inside the door, we entered a large, light, clean, open space, with a comfortable rug and the walls in pleasant light earth tones. It doesn’t feel like a “ward,” it feels like a “living room,” with the stress on “living.”

Not dying but living.

This was nice.

There’s an enormous, open kitchen off to one side (all the appliances need keys, held by staffers only, to operate), and a big social room where a dozen elderly residents are sitting around a big dining room table, playing bingo.

A staffer is spinning the wire-meshed bingo ball filled with bouncing ping-pong balls, then reading out the numbers in a voice loud enough to reach the back rows of an opera house.

So here’s where the really good part starts.

My Mom is suddenly looking around with big wide interested eyes.

She sees some paintings on the walls.

“Oh, this is a really nice painting,” she says, pointing at one.

We go by the big, open kitchen.

“What a nice kitchen,” she says.

We walk by the bingo party. Two or three of the old ladies wave at me, my brother Bruce, the marketing director and Mom. My Mom waves back!

We walk down a wide open hallway with residents’ rooms on either side. The doors to virtually every room, it seems, are wide open. I don’t see a single door that’s fully shut, although a few are open just a crack. More often, I look directly into someone’s efficiency-style apartment — a bed, a sofa chair, a chest of drawers, a desk, photos on the walls, knick-knacks on the shelves.

There is a curious little picture window inset into the wall next to every door, each one containing a few precious items from the resident’s life — photographs of children and spouses, little toys or dolls, jewelry or open pendants. They are called “Memory Boxes” and they serve as room locators for residents who might forget a room number but will remember a beloved keepsake.

In one Memory Box is a little watercolor painting, an open case of watercolor pigments and a watercolor brush. An artist lives here! In her young adulthood, my Mom attended an art school and worked as a commercial artist in Boston, painting restaurant murals and designing department store windows. Maybe she’d find a new friend in the man or woman who lives in this room?

There are windows everywhere. Which is great, because Mom loves looking out windows. In her present apartment, on the 13th floor of the independent living facility, she stands for hours looking out over the landscape. When we come into the room she will say, “Come here, come here,” and excitedly point out something she has spotted — an oddly-shaped cloud, a flock of crows in a tree, a construction site where a new building is going up.

In the memory care suite, we pass window after window that looks out onto the sidewalk, the street, a parking lot. They aren’t spectacular views by any stretch, but they are outside. There is a sense of grounded-ness in this place, and also of openness. The idea that this place is a lock-up, somehow is dissipated by several other factors in play. One is the design of the place — the colors, the windows, the Memory Boxes, lots of other details. But also, the direct and sunny dispositions of the staffers who are always nearby, attentive and caring but not pushy, makes one forget that the doors around here — the ones that lead to the bigger world anyway — are locked.

I have to say that somehow, both the architecture and the attitude of this place seems to signal it is opened up, more than locked down. open than closed. In so many of the ways that matter — the care put into how the space looks and feels, the human relationships, the activities going on — the reality is of an openness, an access to outside and to nature at least through the eyes (although there is an outside walking garden too). Equally important, a good flow of feelings is going around between residents, and especially from the staff who set a confident, structured, cheerful tone.

What can you call all of this taken together, but joy?

We find ourselves in a family room with an enormous picture window looking onto the walking garden. “This is such a nice place,” my Mom says again. “That garden needs some work. I could pull some weeds. Let’s come here again.”

As we are leaving, we meet an elderly gentleman just leaving his room.

“I’m off to see my patients,” he says. He is a retired physician, we learn.

“Oh, that sounds like fun,” my Mom says.

“It will be a busy day,” the doctor says. “I need to meet with my residents too.”

“Tell me about that,” my Mom says.

My brother, the marketing director and I keep walking, leaving my Mom and the retired physician behind. When we are well down the hall, I turn around and look back. Mom and the doctor are deep in conversation. The doctor is talking and my Mom is nodding and smiling and listening. She was never the type to stand and listen politely if she feels the energy was wrong, so this signals that she feels like the energy is right, and she’s really enjoying the encounter.

As a son who cares for his Mom, who is working hard in his middle age to soften his Mom’s journey into decline, I ask you again: What can you call this but joy?

When I saw my Mom chatting with the retired doctor, my heart leaped up.

These days, if my Mom is happy, I’m happy. And somehow, against all expectations, this place — this lockup! — is making my Mom happy.

How can this be?

What I think happened is this: when my brother, my Mom and I toured this memory unit, we changed our fears and worries into love. We didn’t set out do to do this, of course. We didn’t even want to go there! Who would want to spend even a minute staring loss and diminishment and decripitude in the face? Who would want to spend even a minute contemplating how a loved one, not least a parent who gave you your own life, now in so many ways is fading away?

But we went, and when we arrived, we discovered that what we were fearing was only that: a fear. At that point, we were free to see what was really there.

And what was really there, were people who understood. These were the residents, their families, and the staff of the center. There were people who had been where we were, and were now welcoming us to join them.

To join them in the collective journey, the collective adventure, of being human and figuring out how to deal with the whole arc of life, beginning to end.

It’s not easy, none of it. Especially, not the end.

Sure, they lock the doors at Bandel Hills. But when we took to the time to listen to what my Mom was telling us, here is what she said: she liked it.

No, she loved it. She wanted to go back.

Which should we prioritize, our own fears that we are “locking Mom up,” or what Mom is actually telling us with her words and her body language and her energy: that she likes this place, that she likes the openness but also the structure, that it makes her feel safe?

I don’t think this is just a rationalization. I know, of course, that if we move Mom into this memory unit there may (or indeed there will) be bumps in the road.

There may, or even there will be, times when my Mom with her ever-active wanderlust will want to wander, on her own, onto the street and into the world.

And now, she won’t be able to do that. She will be restrained.

But what is real freedom? And will Mom, in the world that she mentally inhabits now, really lose it in this place?

Or are we, by putting Mom in memory care, actually giving her a new kind of freedom — a freedom from the fear of getting lost, for one thing. A freedom from the risk of actually harming herself? And giving her, as well, a new freedom to explore a new world.

A physically smaller world perhaps, but maybe, who knows, one that will to her seem like a whole new universe?

A universe with warmth, new friends, new colors, a big kitchen, a dining room table, a walking garden, paintings on the walls, bingo, Memory Boxes, picture windows, and safety?

What can you call this but joy?