Age-Old Dramas I Can't Help but Experience

My heart is at it again, I’m afraid. This world is too much for me with its babies dying in fires and sons hacking their mothers to death. My heart breaks a little each time I watch the news. But it’s the close at hand reality that really gets me. Today at the library, the five little old ladies in their wheelchairs, shuffling feet propelling them forward. I flash forward myself, to see them back in their nursing home rooms by themselves, living out their days staring at white walls and only ever half reading the books they choose. Or later at the grocery store, the man in his wheelchair-stickered car, stuck halfway in and out of the parking space because his car won’t start. I stop and offer to help. He doesn’t need me and says it will start again soon. He sounds surprised at my offer. I wonder what he is going home to. See the two small blue bags on the seat next to his cane. I imagine what cold house or dark rooms await him tonight. And I wonder about myself. Will all the pieces of my heart be eaten up in these vignettes by the time I reach old age? Or does each encounter fill me up, make me speak more gently, love more deeply, and prepare me for the time when I will be alone, with only the memories of long-ago days for my companions.