Reflections: What Courage Looks Like

I’m currently writing a series about the relationships between senior companions and their elderly clients for Ethos and Boston City Hall. This is also part of my new writing project in Boston, The Memory Initiative, www.memoryinitiative.com. In the meantime, I want to share some of my personal experiences with these fascinating people. By reflecting on their stories, I hope to make sense of my own. 

By Cassandra Baptista

There are moments when I’m sitting across from someone and I become overwhelmed with a quiet sense of sadness. I’m looking at this woman, who soon will be 92, and as happy as she seems, I want to cry. She talks about her life in New York City during the ‘40s, her encounters with famous people, her trips across the country, but despite this colorful life, there has been profound pain.

She touches on it briefly but keeps it vague (sometimes there’s no need for elaboration): “I’ve had a lot of tragedy in my life.” And in a bizarre way, I knew that already. Sometimes I think you can just feel that with people.

She seems genuinely excited to see me and I think to myself, "How often do you get visitors?  How often are they my age? What do you think when you look at me?” Without having to ask, she says, “You never think you’ll be this age.” But ever since I was a child, I’ve thought about it a lot.

I think I have a heightened sense of awareness that I will age, that I am aging, that one day I might be sitting at a table not unlike this one staring at a 21-year-old girl who seems to think she knows something, but knows nothing.

For all the talking and feeling I do, I struggle to pinpoint where my sadness for her comes from. Is it because she never married? Because she experienced so many deaths in her life? Because she navigated her way through this life largely by herself?

Inside I say to her, “You’re so brave.”