The Letter in the Pocket
After her mother’s funeral, Anna went to the hospital to collect her belongings. When the nurse handed her the clothes of the deceased mother, a note suddenly fell out of the pocket of the robe. Anna unfolded the paper, immediately recognized her mother’s handwriting, and after reading what was written, was seized by real horror.
The Return
After the funeral, Anna returned to the hospital once again to pick up her mother’s things.
She had put off this moment until the very last, but she understood that she could delay it no longer. Five days had passed since her mother was buried, yet the feeling that everything had happened just moments ago never left her.
There was a constant heaviness in her chest, breathing was difficult, and her thoughts were tangled like yarn that had been dropped and rolled across the floor. Anna stood in the corridor of the city hospital, clutching a simple plastic bag to her chest.
Inside it was everything that remained of her mother after the long months of treatment—a toothbrush, a comb with a few silver hairs still caught in the bristles, a small bottle of lavender lotion her mother had loved, a pair of reading glasses with one arm slightly bent.
To outsiders, they were just belongings, ordinary items that could be found in any discount store. To her, they were an entire life, fragments of a person who had shaped everything Anna knew about love and safety. The nurse from the oncology department, a heavyset woman with tired eyes and sensible shoes, looked at Anna with sincere compassion and quietly said that there was still a robe and a pair of house slippers left in the bedside table.
She added that Anna’s mother had been very patient and kind, never complaining even when the pain was clearly unbearable, and that everyone who had worked with her and cared for her during those final months had grown fond of her.
She had a way of asking about their lives, the nurse said, remembering their children’s names, thanking them for every small kindness. Anna nodded silently.
She was afraid to speak, because any word could have turned into tears, and once the tears started in this fluorescent-lit hallway with its smell of antiseptic and floor wax, she wasn’t sure they would ever stop. Not long ago, her mother had been right there—joking despite the IV pole attached to her arm, trying to support Anna even from a hospital bed, making plans for the future and saying with absolute conviction that everything would be fine, that she’d be home soon, that they’d plant tomatoes in the garden come spring.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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