Judith – a memoir

Hi, friends. It’s been too long and the fault’s all mine. I’ve written and shared with a few close to me, but I want to find the courage to start sharing with you again.

Last semester I took a class called Journal and Autobiographical Writing (which could more aptly be called Memoir Writing). It forced me to process my life and memories—why I am the way I am and the people who’ve touched me in big and small ways. There were some sweet moments, some painful ones, even some that were eye-opening. And I discovered a form of writing that feels like home to me. So humor me as I’ve chosen to share one of the early pieces of that journey with you.

And thank you more than words can say for sticking with me through these silent months.

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Names have been changed to respect the privacy of those involved.

I could never cry at work. Not when others were suffering. Not even when I heard they died. The tears always came later, when I came home after a long day. It would be as I lay my head down on the pillow that I felt the knot in my throat, hard and unrelenting, and the silent tears squeezed out, hot over my cheekbones down into my hair. I was glad no one could see me. It was my way of mourning.

When I came back from school to work at the retirement home over the summer, the first thing I heard from Simone, the receptionist, was that she was moving at the end of the month—it was about time after so many years at the same job—and did I know Judith died just a few weeks ago?

My heart felt like stone, cold and hard.

“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “I loved her so.”

We moved on.

I knew Ralph would feel it. Since my first day at the retirement home, a girl of seventeen, he and Judith had always sat together at the same two-top, she with her curly white 90s era perm, he with his scruffy overalls and beard and squinty eyes. They would eat and talk for an hour, and then shuffle out the doors with their walkers and up to their apartments for the night. Never missed a night.

You pick up things when you work as a waitress in a place where everyone has a routine and those who don’t stick out like hiccups in the clockwork. Those were the days of COVID, when we all wore masks and my soft-spoken teenage self had to kneel down and shout to be heard.

I learned by day three that Judith liked her coffee black with cream and stevia and Ralph always ordered a tall POG, and they both loved their clam chowder on Fridays. She was a fundamentalist Baptist. He was a progressive Presbyterian. He could never remember my name, and she loved the shiny brown wristwatch I always wore. She played the piano. He whistled and sang. They both loved the old hymns.

It was Judith who first discovered when I started playing the piano every Wednesday night after my shift.

Behind my back I heard the shuffling of a walker, then the appearance of a white cloud of hair by my shoulder. She peered at me through giant, gold-rimmed glasses, mask half below her nose.

“Is that Libby?”

I laughed and nodded, afraid to speak and get my fingers out of rhythm.

To my surprise she began to sing along, her voice wobbly, but pure, every lyric of the hymn spot on. I sped up to keep pace with her and at the end, when the last note was played, we grinned at each other over the piano.

“Another one!” she said, eyes fired up and ready to go.

We played and sang until my ride came twenty minutes later.

The first question she asked me when I saw her the next day was, “When are you going to play again?”

It became a Wednesday night ritual for me to play hymns at the retirement home, sprinkled with bits of Debussy, Chopin, and Grieg. More residents wandered through as the nights wore on and began coming as regulars to what they christened the “Wednesday concerts.” I wasn’t fond of the title—I almost always played the same songs—but took it in stride, knowing it lent a certain gaiety to their evenings that COVID had stolen when it mandated isolation from the outside world.

Judith was the only one who sang these nights—and sing she did, tapping the floor with her foot to make sure I kept up a good rollicking pace. I knew she used to play the piano, but her hands were shaky and she told me all she could remember were hymns.

“Those are my favorite anyway,” I told her.

She always tried to get Ralph to come down, but it wasn’t until he found out I was leaving for college that he made the effort to come. I think it was still an accident that he ended up walking through the lobby that night, one week before I left.

He sang too, in his deep throaty voice that slid like butter into my heart. Unlike Judith, he could never remember the words. “It Is Well” was my favorite song to play for him. The chorus was always the same: “Oh my soul, oh my soul!” droned out in perfect time and rhythm. I smiled through the mask and thanked God for these crooked and joyous men and women who had stolen into my heart and become like grandmas and grandpas to me.

I didn’t cry when I left the place. I expected I’d see them again when I came back.

A year passed and I returned and Judith died.

Ralph cried every time he saw me. I reminded him of Judith. The ache in my chest grew. Who else had gone without me knowing?

It was the end of July when Caroline, the head nurse, strode quietly through the kitchen, letting each of us know that Warren Murphy was about to leave this life and the family had opened the room for us to say goodbye. I was the last one to go up. Room 270, end of the hall. The door was wide open and I walked inside. His daughters and son, gray-haired and teary-eyed thanked me for coming. Then he was gone.

I had never seen someone die before.

And it broke me.

They handed me a card with information about the funeral. It said that Warren had donated his body for research.

I backed out of the room; the family was grieving and I had no place to be there.

Outside the elevator, the tears came. I cried for Warren. I cried for Judith. I cried because I had seen death.