It’s a rainy afternoon in Singapore and I’m having a hot jasmine tea — the perfect moment to eat dark chocolate with mint. When I open the little box, my thoughts go back to when I met this amazing woman in the hospital in Utrecht a few months ago.
It’s 9:00 a.m., we just finished having breakfast at the little table in the corner of the hospital room. We both had yoghurt and muesli and a cup of hot tea and discussed the bad night of sleep we both had. She stands up to get her handbag and offers me chocolate from a cute little box with a light brown bow around it. Her son brings her chocolate on the days he visits her. He tells her to enjoy every single piece in that box because they’re all different. A female chocolate eater is rare these days, let alone someone who admits eating it every day without shame. My kind of woman.
“Do you want a bonbon?” she asks, returning to the breakfast table after grabbing the golden box. It’s never too early for chocolate, so I happily pick a beautiful piece of art from the box. It’s dark with a coffee bean on top of it. It looks amazing, like a mini present wrapped with love for a special person. We eat chocolate in silence. We smell it, taste the outside, look at it from different angles, analyze the type of chocolate and the filling, and let it melt in our mouth for a couple of seconds like real connoisseurs. We met two days before.
She’s eighty-five. The curly grey hair and pink lipstick don’t reveal she received a new heart valve today. The moment she’s allowed to sit, she sits — and talks. She moves to my side of the bed, sits down, and we’re friends immediately. I hang on every word she says, hold my breath with every story she tells. We don’t stop chatting until the nurse tells us to get some sleep and the hospital lights go down.
She tells me her husband’s job at the United Nations took them all over the world. They first lived in Lesotho after only being together for a couple of years. Lesotho is her favorite place in the world and was the most exciting time of her life, with her two young boys, eating exotic food from local markets, traveling the region in a jeep, fighting against apartheid at a time when that was not done, making local friends, supporting local causes and tribes. Her blue eyes twinkle when she talks about their adventures there and turn sad when she tells me they suddenly had to leave for another mission. That was over sixty years ago but it’s like she left yesterday.
She visited my favorite cities and loves the countries I’ve been to and are on my bucket list. She lived in rock & roll New York when Studio 54 was the place to be and graffiti was not seen as art yet. When Harlem was too dangerous to walk around and Hell’s Kitchen was far away from gentrification. She lived in rough London when smoking in the Tube wasn’t even a discussion and nobody wanted to live near the theatres at West End. She lived in exotic but poor Manila eating Asian food for the first time and joined her husband on most of his work trips to posh-to-be Singapore, post-war Vietnam, and communist China. She took every opportunity to be with him, to explore the world together, and absorb every part of culture. She wants to know everything about me, my favorite places in the world, and the precious people in my life. She asks me what my plans are for the future and how I handle the challenges that come my way.
She studies mindfulness and reads me a couple of paragraphs aloud that impressed her, and she thinks might benefit me. She recommends books by female writers she thinks I’d like, because women should always support each other. She tells me about her closest friendships and why they work, where she goes for a walk every day with her neighbor, that she also wants to try yoga, and that she misses her husband to whom she was married for sixty-five years. The love of her life. “There’s no adventure like marriage,” she says.
She tells me life’s too short to worry. That worries have never solved any problems — they only make them worse. That everything will be fine in the end, and that I’ll feel even better tomorrow than she does today. To take care of myself and take it easy when my body demands it, always and everywhere. To cherish every moment and enjoy life as much as I can, hang out with special people, and avoid spending precious time with people who waste it. To try new things to enrich my life and to enjoy love, because in the end, of all the things you accomplish in your life, love is all that matters. To love myself, live my life the way I want to and not let anyone tell me otherwise — and to eat good chocolate until my very last day.
We talk about everything, except our hearts, which is interesting considering we’re both at the west wing of the hospital. We have way more interesting subjects to talk about, something we obviously both need.
Of all the people in the hospital I could have met, I meet her. Dozens of people at the cardiac ward and I get to spend my time with her. An optimistic heart patient who’s enjoyed the best time of her life abroad, a storyteller who still wants to learn at eighty-five, and eats chocolate, every single day. As if meeting this special woman was meant to be, to get an inspiring glimpse of what’s coming. I think about her, her beautiful stories, and wise words, every day when I eat a piece of chocolate. I want to be her when I grow up.
