The Woman I Knew Before I Knew Him
Welcome to Sacred Musings, a space where I share reflections from the heart on love, life, caregiving, and the lessons that shape us into who we are. My hope is that these words bring comfort, perspective, and inspiration to anyone walking their own path of healing and growth.
Life has a funny way of introducing us to people long before we realize they’ve already entered our story. Years before I met Jeffrey, I already knew his grandmother. Well… “knew” is probably too strong a word.
I was an LVN working hospice on-call in the East Bay. My evenings were filled with the kinds of visits that only hospice nurses know so well: pain crises, medication reconciliations, falls, tuck-in visits, and the occasional family needing reassurance more than anything else. One of the skilled nursing facilities I visited often was on Ashby Avenue in Berkeley. As soon as you walked through the front doors, there they were.
Three little old ladies, almost always gathered near the nurses’ station. It became one of those comforting constants that nursing homes somehow create. Shift after shift, visit after visit, there they would be watching the hallway, greeting staff, observing the little world that passed in front of them every day. One of them always caught my attention. She was tiny. Beautiful in that unmistakable way that only comes with extraordinary age. She had soft eyes and a peaceful presence that never seemed rushed or demanding. Eventually I learned her room. Eventually I learned her name. And after that, every time I walked in, I’d smile and say, “Hello, Miss ______.” She would smile back. That was the entirety of our relationship. Simple. Kind. Completely ordinary. Or so I thought. A year or two later, I joined Match.com. That’s where I met Jeffrey. As we got to know one another, we spent hours doing what new couples often do, telling stories.
He told me about his childhood.
His business.
His triumphs.
His heartbreaks.
He talked about chasing his high school sweetheart all the way to Mexico. He talked about his divorce and the difficult chapters that had shaped him. And then he talked about his grandmother.
His voice softened.
He told me they shared the same birthday. He spoke about how close they had always been and how, in many ways, she had filled spaces in his life that his mother hadn’t. Whenever work allowed, he’d stop by the farmers market on Saturdays, buy strawberries and fresh scones, and bring them to her at the nursing home on Ashby Avenue. As he talked, I realized exactly who he meant. It was the little lady by the nurses’ station.
The one I’d been greeting for years.
I never interrupted him.
I never said, “I’ve met your grandmother.”
I simply listened. It wasn’t a secret. It just never seemed important to the conversation. He was sharing someone he loved, and I was learning about her through his eyes, while quietly realizing that I already knew a small piece of her through mine. Even after Jeffrey and I eventually went our separate ways, hospice occasionally brought me back to that same nursing home. Sometimes she was sitting near the nurses’ station.
Sometimes she was in her room.
Sometimes she was eating lunch.
Whenever I saw her, I’d smile.
“Hello, Miss ______.”
She’d smile back.
Working in hospice teaches you that peace isn’t the absence of hardship. Living in a nursing home often means surrendering pieces of your independence, your routines, and sometimes your privacy. Yet she carried herself with a quiet grace that I always admired. Looking back now, I smile at the irony. This tiny, gentle woman unknowingly stood at the very beginning of one of the most emotionally complicated chapters of my life.
She was all “shhh…”
…before the “ROARRR.”
Or, as I now know is the perfect Yiddish word for it…Before all the mishigas. Funny enough, I didn’t even realize mishigas was a Yiddish word until years later. It seems fitting, though, because she was Jewish, and so was that side of Jeffrey’s family. Somehow the language found its way into the story before I ever knew it belonged there.
Life does that sometimes. It plants little details that don’t make sense until much later. Most people assume our stories begin the day we meet someone important. But sometimes the first chapter was written years earlier, in the most ordinary of places, with nothing more than a smile exchanged between a hospice nurse and a tiny woman sitting quietly beside a nurses’ station.
Neither of us had any idea we had already become a small part of each other’s story.
By Kimberly!
