Stop Calling Things Too Sentimental

<p>They told me she hadn&rsquo;t eaten in a week.</p> <p>That she&rsquo;d&nbsp;<em>just</em>&nbsp;said the day before how much she&rsquo;d love a bagel, of all things.</p> <p>I didn&rsquo;t know that last August when I bought a dozen and left them, warm and fresh, in the&nbsp;community&nbsp;kitchen at hospice one morning. When her family found them they couldn&rsquo;t believe it &mdash; they loaded one up with cream cheese and took it right to her.</p> <p>She ate the whole thing. Sitting up in her hospital bed the young woman in her twenties, dying from cancer, savored every bite.</p> <p>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&rsquo;s final days.</p> <p>When I bought the bagels that morning, I&rsquo;d only wanted to give something to the world in the middle of all that sorrow. In the anticipation of grief.</p> <p>Sometimes that&rsquo;s all we can do. Give.</p> <p>My grandmother would have loved to know about the bagels. I wish I could have told her (she&rsquo;d have cried, too). She&rsquo;d love me telling&nbsp;<em>you</em>&nbsp;about them, though. Because she knew something, all her long life: being sentimental is the good stuff. It connects us, if we let it.</p> <p>But too often, we don&rsquo;t. We treat sentimentality like a character flaw.</p> <p><a href="https://medium.com/middle-pause/pssst-stop-calling-things-too-sentimental-b5f74aa87745">Visit Now</a></p>