The ward smelled of cheap medicine, boiled cabbage, and old age—so thick and heavy you could almost spoon it out. Edith Whitmore sat on the edge of her bed, fiddling with the frayed hem of her faded dressing gown—the same one she used to wear while sipping tea by the kitchen window at home. Back when she still had a home…
On the next bed sat a woman twenty years her senior, statue-still, staring at nothing. Her dull gaze fixed on the wall as if it were a window to another world.
Suddenly, the woman slowly stood, grabbed a chair, and dragged it over to Edith. “Edie, love,” she rasped, sinking heavily beside her. “Tell me… how’d you end up here?” Her faded eyes held the same helplessness as a child’s, as if she weren’t an old woman at all—just a little girl the world had long forgotten.
Edith almost brushed her off. She could’ve said, *You won’t understand, you won’t remember.* But instead, she spoke. Because for the first time in ages, someone actually wanted to listen.
“It started with silence,” she murmured, voice wavering. “First, Clive rang less and less. A meeting, then his son’s football practice, then just… ‘forgot.’ His wife, Margaret, never cared much for me. And Toby, my grandson… well, boys that age don’t have time for their nan. I get it.”
The old woman leaned in, nodding. She’d been in the home three years—every story sounded like her own.
“Then they stopped remembering. My birthday came and went—just another day. Then Mother’s Day. Then Christmas. And I… I still waited. Baked a treacle tart, the kind Clive loved as a boy. Set the table. Put out that old photo of us at Brighton. Him in his little trunks, me laughing, still young. I stared at it and thought, *They’ll come. They promised.*”
Edith sighed deeply. Her eyes glistened. The woman gently touched her shoulder.
“They came. Late. Stood in the hall, Clive staring at his shoes. ‘Mum,’ he said, ‘we’ve decided…’ The rest was a blur. Just his words, like a verdict: ‘Toby needs his own room. And you… you’ll be better off here. Care, medicine, routine…’”
“And what’d you say?” the old woman whispered.
Edith gave a bitter chuckle. “What could I say? I just stammered, ‘But I… I’m…’ And that was it. Movers. Boxes. They took my walnut dresser—the one with the carved roses—and I reached for it, but Toby was glued to his phone. Not a glance. No ‘goodbye,’ no ‘thank you.’ Like I’d never existed.”
“Do they call now?”
“Clive rang yesterday,” Edith said flatly. “Asked how I was. I said, ‘Remember how you’d crawl into my bed during thunderstorms? Shaking like a little sparrow…’ He said, ‘No, I don’t.’ So that’s that. Doesn’t remember. Or won’t.”
The woman took her hand—gnarled, warm, just like Edith’s own mother’s used to be. Silent.
“Know the real kicker?” Edith went on. “They’re renting out my flat now. Money’s for Toby’s tutors. ‘No point leaving it empty,’ Clive said. It’s a Pilates studio now. Can you believe it? Where my old sideboard was, women in leggings twist themselves into pretzels…”
Outside, the trolley of dinner trays rattled down the hall. The setting sun bled orange through the windows. The quiet was unbearable.
“But *I* remember,” Edith whispered. “All of it. His first tooth. Rocking him to sleep. The time he cried over a B in maths. I gave everything, my whole life. And now… now I’m just in the way.”
The old woman wrapped an arm around her, resting her cheek on Edith’s silver hair. Her hand—rough, familiar—couldn’t save her from the loneliness.
They sat like that in the dim ward, between the past’s warmth and the present’s hollow silence.
And just one thought nagged:
*What if they remember me someday?*
