The whole thing lasted maybe ten seconds. I’d stopped at the supermarket for a few necessities before rushing home for an important client call. Throwing my groceries on the counter, I paced back and forth, willing the cashier to hurry.
With perfect lethargy and counting the minutes until her shift would end, the cashier waited for each of my items on the conveyer belt to reach her and scanned them. I went to the end of the counter, grabbed two plastic bags and started packing, hopefully telegraphing her to hurry it up. Finally paying, I flung my bags into the cart and headed for the exit.
That’s when I saw her. Near the end of the checkout counter, her aide fussing with a sweater behind her, she sat in her wheelchair, immobile. About my age, she had faded brown hair in haphazard curls around her face, her skin gray and drawn. Her left arm lay crumpled against her side. Her legs, obviously useless, were hidden under a blanket.
Our eyes met.
Her look riveted me. What did it telegraph? Yearning, sorrow, anger, envy?
I imagined her life.
Here she was, having to be pushed everywhere, barely able to lift anything with her good arm. Here I was, swinging my bags like a child’s backpack and briskly pushing my cart.
Here she was, having to rely on a dark-skinned, hard-to-understand stranger for the basic necessity of getting food. Here I was, having whirled through five sections in record time to restock my staples.
Here she was, at the big outing of the month, in which she could hardly participate (it didn’t seem like she could talk). Here I was, wanting only to finish this errand to get on to bigger things.
Here she was, nowhere else to go except the bathroom when she had to, and even in that needing painstaking and embarrassed help. Here I was, almost running as I steered my cart toward the door, busy, directed, taking my vigor for granted.
When we looked at each other, I saw the layers of a lifetime that had brought her to this moment. Her eyes locked into mine–embodiment of what she might have once been and so much wished to be again.
Out the door, careening my cart toward the parking lot, I couldn’t erase her face from my mind. And I felt suffused with gratitude. For my life, health, hard-won habits of diet and exercise, profession of writing and editing and passion to always improve.
Does it come down to choices? Caring for yourself, pursuing what you love, deciding what attitudes to reject and take in about aging? I’ll never know her answers or conclusions, or whether her choices brought her to her wheelchair. For me, though, the choices are key.
I opened the car door, placed the bags on the seat next to me, and got in. Driving home, I kept seeing the face and eyes of that silent woman in the wheelchair. And sent her love.