They told me she hadn’t eaten in a week.
That she’d just said the day before how much she’d love a bagel, of all things.
I didn’t know that last August when I bought a dozen and left them, warm and fresh, in the community kitchen at hospice one morning. When her family found them they couldn’t believe it — they loaded one up with cream cheese and took it right to her.
She ate the whole thing. Sitting up in her hospital bed the young woman in her twenties, dying from cancer, savored every bite.
And when the hospice staff told me about it that afternoon, it made me cry. Everything made me cry that week a year ago, when my mom and I were 5-day residents at hospice during my 95-year-old grandmother’s final days.
When I bought the bagels that morning, I’d only wanted to give something to the world in the middle of all that sorrow. In the anticipation of grief.
Sometimes that’s all we can do. Give.
My grandmother would have loved to know about the bagels. I wish I could have told her (she’d have cried, too). She’d love me telling you about them, though. Because she knew something, all her long life: being sentimental is the good stuff. It connects us, if we let it.
But too often, we don’t. We treat sentimentality like a character flaw.