“Excuse me, can you open my pickles?” an elderly woman asked in a slight German accent as she approached me at the grocery store. I was doing my best to appear busy and unapproachable, but clearly I hadn’t been successful.
You see, I have a condition I call “Talk to Me Face”. It causes strangers to engage in conversation with me almost everywhere I go. I think it has something to do with the fact that I was taught to look everyone in the eye and smile, and I can’t shake that compulsion. Perhaps they can see that I crave human connection; creating new bonds is one of my greatest joys in life. In any case, this is why one of the female greeters at the same store knows me by name and one of my favorite checkout employees hugged me on one of her final days before retirement. (You may have deduced that I’m at the grocery store frequently…meal planning is not one of my strengths.) Though I had become accustomed to this type of encounter, this particular request caught me off-guard.
She continued, “I’m not going to steal them. My husband died a few years ago, and I can’t loosen the lid on my own”. Well I was all in at this point (and yes, I opened those pickles for her immediately, which is a bit of a feat because I often have to ask my husband to complete the same task for me).
I’m happy that wasn’t the end of our encounter. For the next 20 minutes or so, she continued to tell me the story of their love. How they met in “The War”. How he was the best husband in the world (she mentioned this multiple times). How handsome he was. (She said I was handsome too, but not like him. I appreciated her candor). I could feel how much she loved and missed him. But in that moment it was like he was there, in that aisle, in that store, with us. I don’t know if she really wanted pickles; I think she simply wanted to tell someone about him so he could come for a visit. If I had had my wits about me instead of being on the verge of tears, I would have thanked her for introducing me to him.
I think about her and that day a lot. As I get older and I lose more people that I love, I realize I speak about them in the way she spoke about her beloved husband. When I do things they used to do, it’s like they’re an extra set of hands. I cook things in Gramma Kessler’s bakeware to feel like I’m spending time with her, sitting in the tiny banquette in her and Grampa’s kitchen. I putz around in the camper to commune with Grandma and Grandpa McDougle like we would in their pop-up. (And I spell Gramma/Grampa and Grandma/Grandpa differently, depending on the set of grandparents, because Gramma was very adamant about how that word is spelled. I disagree but respect her opinion).
I don’t believe in an afterlife, so I don’t think any of my departed friends and family are waiting to have a formal reunion with me. But I have mini-reunions with them all the time. I think a certain immortality is achieved through the stories we tell about our lost loved ones, the actions we complete in memory and in honor of them. Perhaps heaven is having the best parts of you remembered and shared and celebrated, while hell has more of a “good riddance” sort of vibe.
I hope to live in such a way to compel my dear ones to tell total strangers about me long after I’m gone. I’d be overjoyed to be the reason someone asks you to open a jar of pickles for them…just not anytime soon.