PART 1
I started volunteering at the hospice a few years ago, on a Thursday evening, because a woman at my work said they were short and because I had nothing on.
That is the whole origin of it. There was no calling.
That is where I met Wilhelmina.
She was seventy. The illness was terminal and everybody in that building knew the shape of it, and she still had days where the brightness of her completely outshone the diagnosis.
For weeks I sat with her, reading, and listening to her stories.
She was a very good talker. That is the thing I would want said first, before anything else in this, because everything that has been written about her since describes a frail woman and she was not one.
She could describe a bus queue in 1974 for eleven minutes and you would not want her to stop.
My name is Cosima and I was twenty-seven when I met her and I am thirty-one now.
I had been going for about fourteen months by then and I was not good at it. I want that on the page early.
I talked too much. I filled silences. New volunteers all do it and the training tells you not to and you do it anyway for about a year.
She was the first person in that building who did not let me.
She would simply stop, and wait, and look at me, until I stopped as well. It took about four visits before I could sit in a room with her without talking.
I thought she was teaching me something. She was interviewing me.
And she had lived her entire life on her own. No husband. No children. No family to speak of.
That is what she told me, in those words, on the second afternoon.
Not the fourth. Not the tenth.
The second.
I have gone back through it since and that entire biography — no husband, no children, no family to speak of — arrived inside about ninety minutes of a woman meeting me for the first time.
Nobody volunteers that. Nobody in that building volunteers anything on day two; it takes weeks to get somebody’s daughter’s name out of them.
She led with it, cleanly, in one sentence, and I did not notice for two years.
One afternoon she told me something that took the ground out from under me.
She said the one regret of her life was that she had never known what it felt like to be a bride.
She said she just wanted to wear a wedding dress.
She wanted to know what it was to be chosen, even once, before her time ran out.
She said it badly, which is the part that got me.
She did not deliver it. She went red and looked at the window and said about four words too many at the end, and then she said ignore me and asked about my journey in.
A woman who could describe a bus queue for eleven minutes fumbled that sentence.
I have thought about it a great deal since I read that file, and I have arrived somewhere I can live with, which is that a person can plan the shape of a conversation for eleven weeks and still not be able to say the line.
The sentence was prepared. The going red was not.
By then she was one of the people I cared about most in that building, and I am aware of how that sentence reads now and I am leaving it in, because it was true when I thought it.
So I found a simple white gown in a charity shop in town for forty-one pounds, and had it taken in by a woman who would not let me pay her.
I arranged for a chaplain to come in. I asked the nurses. I brought flowers from a supermarket.
