All My Friends Are Dead...

Nothing prepared me for a cup of tea in my 94-year-old client's kitchen.

Here's the thing about this job I didn't know... it's not the lifting, the cleaning, the e-paperwork, the screening checks. It's the human aspect of it all.

She'd asked me a couples times before. Halfway through pulling weeds, moving pots, hands in the dirt, she'd shuffle to the door... "Would you like some tea?"

I'd always say no.

Politeness. Boundaries. Call it what you want.

Yesterday I said yes. Because something inevitable was coming...

Turns out tea was a ticket to a brief tour of her place.

The sewing room and its organised chaos. Half-sewn bits all over the place. The spare room with the the neat book cupboard. Filled with novels. Some of them were 800+ page beasts.

She reads without glasses. Ninety-four years old and she reads without glasses. Even read the fine print on a package without so much as a squint! Never fails to surprise me, this one.

Then the photos. Family. Faces going back generations. Her grandmother, staring out of a photo old enough that the woman in it has been dust for longer than I've been alive.

And then, casually, like she was just mentioning the weather, she said, "All of my friends, even the ones from the nursing home, are dead."

That landed hard. Two hours of gardening and I'm standing in a hallway getting my heart quietly broken.

"But I'm not complaining," she said with defiance.

That. Right there. The line. The lesson... delivered without a hint of self-pity. Quiet strength.

So we headed back to her garden with the tea, and I told her.

"I'm going back to study."

"Oh, that's nice," she said. "What are you going to study?"

"Cert 3, Disability Support, and lectures are from Monday to Thursday".

"Am I going to lose you?"

Her face did something small. A flicker. You'd miss it if you weren't paying attention.

"Looks like it," I said. "Classes from Monday to Thursday."

"Can you fit me in?"

I didn't have an answer. I gave her the only honest one I had... let me check the timetable, I'll get back to your daughter and give you a call too.

The support-worker equivalent of "It's not you, it's the roster."

She told me Fridays work, except the first Friday of the month. "That's my only social outing for the whole month... besides Bunnings and the supermarket".

I am no gardener extraordinaire. My fortnightly sessions were to help her around the garden. She tells me what to do and I do it. Her daughter said so.

But it seemed like more. It was the company. I've always walked away with stories to tell my wife over dinner.

You don't get that from being a terrific worker. You get that from paying attention. Listening. Having something useful to say. Not just nodding along while preoccupied.

Ninety-four years old. No friends left. Family is around, but lives alone. And still not complaining.

I've got a lot to learn from her before Monday to Thursday takes me away.

And the ball is in my court.. Should I set aside the 2nd and 4th Friday for her?