On hospital breakfasts, blueberry jam, and the woman who told me to begin.
When I walked into the hospital room, she looked as if my arrival might make things worse.
I felt the same way about hers.
She was in her eighties, frail and thin in her bed, and she had clearly not planned to share her room with anyone. I had not planned it either. I walked to my bed, literally an arm’s length from hers, put down my bag, and looked at the wall.
We did not speak.
For two days, we lived our solitudes at arm’s length. We heard everything; every grunt, every word, every restless turn in the night. We dared, however, not look too closely or ask too much.
I would glance over occasionally. I noticed her skinny body, her fragile frame, the way she seemed to fold inward. I heard her groans in the night. They kept me awake. I wondered about her life. Who she was. What she was doing there. What she knew about herself that I did not yet know about me.
I did not dare ask.
On the fourth night, the night after her first chemotherapy session, something broke open.
It started with hunger.
She was lying restlessly in her bed. The room was tight with fear. I had been biting my pillow in the dark, trying not to make a sound, when I heard her voice, soft but determined, cut through the room.
“I am hungry.”
I sat up immediately.
“Should I call the nurse?”
“No!” she said. “The food will only kill me faster!”
One second of silence.
Then we both broke into laughter.
Real laughter. The kind that breaks something open and lets the air back in.
I turned on the light and reached under my bed, where I had been hiding a rather large assortment of homemade bread and snacks in my suitcase.
My private pantry of fear.
I handed her whatever my fingers found in the dark.
For the first time since my arrival, our eyes met.
I smiled.
She smiled.
Her smile was larger than life. childlike, and pure.
And then we spoke.
I do not remember exactly how the conversation began, only that once it did, it seemed to move on its own. She told me things she said she had not told anyone else. I told her things I had barely admitted to myself.
We laughed. We cried. We remembered. We longed out loud, as the cool breeze from outside whispered int our ears. The Moon as full that evening.
“What is it that you really want to do in life”, Inga asked me, as if she felt that I was off path.
She asked as if time were too short for anything but the truth.
Before I could really think about her question, I spat out the wors
“I want to write.”
The words surprised me.
Except, of course, they did not.
They had been there all along, tucked tightly into my hidden dreams.
The morning of my departure, she asked me to sit and have one last breakfast with her.
We unfolded the little hospital tables, took blue napkins from one of the flower bouquets and placed them diagonally, as if we were in a café and not a hospital room. Then she took one flower and placed it in a long, slender glass, making a little vase.
It looked pretty.
Then she reached under her bed.
From her own clever hiding place, she pulled out some oat cookies and a jar of homemade blueberry jam.
She winked.
“I made this over the summer,” she said.
She had not had an appetite for it until that very moment.
She asked the nurses for bread, and when they walked in, the sound of my favorite Brahms Piano Trio Opus. 8 welcomed them in playing from my computer, the prettily set table, and two women in hospital gowns eating breakfast together as if they had all the time in the world, they stopped and stared.
Just as we began, the doctors arrived to start her next treatment.
Inga looked at them and said, in a loud, firm voice:
“I am having breakfast with Paula. You will come in when I am ready.”
The doctors stood agape. Looked at Inga and then towards me, and then left.
We ate.
The blue napkins. The Brahms. The bread. The oat cookies. The blueberry jam she had made in summer and saved without knowing why until that morning, when she finally wanted to taste something of her own life.
When it was time to go, I should have been relieved and happy to return home. Instead, I gathered my things slowly. I did not know how to say goodbye to someone I had only just met and somehow had already loved.
As I reached the door, with tears in my eyes, she called after me.
“Paula.”
I turned.
“Please start writing now.”