I want to tell you about something that happened to me last February in the parking lot of a grocery store, because I think about it at least once a week and I have not found a way to stop.
I am seventy years old. My name is not important. What is important is that I was having a very hard month. My husband of forty-four years had been in the hospital for a procedure that turned out to be more serious than the doctors initially believed. My daughter lived three states away. I had not slept properly in ten days. I was moving through the days on the kind of autopilot that leaves you functional but barely present, doing the necessary things in the necessary order without quite feeling like you are really there.
I was in the grocery store buying soup. Canned soup, because I did not have the capacity for anything that required more than a pot and a can opener. I was in the soup aisle for a long time because I could not decide between two very similar soups and my ability to make decisions had temporarily left me.
A young woman appeared beside me. She was maybe twenty-five, in a store uniform, restocking the shelf. She glanced at me and then looked again in the way people look when something in someone’s face stops them.
She said: “Are you okay?”
Not the rhetorical kind. The actual kind. The kind with eye contact and a pause afterward that left real room for an honest answer.
I told her my husband was in the hospital. I do not know exactly why I told her. Perhaps because she had asked in a way that made it feel like the truth was an acceptable response.
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