Stop Calling Things Too Sentimental
<p>They told me she hadn’t eaten in a week.</p>
<p>That she’d <em>just</em> said the day before how much she’d love a bagel, of all things.</p>
<p>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.</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’s final days.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Sometimes that’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’d have cried, too). She’d love me telling <em>you</em> 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’t. We treat sentimentality like a character flaw.</p>
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