Agnes in Eslöv

The dreamiest of breakfasts when you're feeling a bit low. Brown rice porridge pretty much drenched in maple syrup and topped with almond flakes. So good! 

When I was in my late teens, I worked one summer as a “nurse’s aid” in a nursing home in Eslöv, which is a very small town outside Lund, where I lived.

Being a “nurse’s aid” meant I helped the nurses and spent time with the patients, all of whom were elderly and most of whom suffered from some kind of dementia.

This is how I met Agnes.

Agnes was in her late 90’s then, sweet and spry. It was obvious that she had once been an attractive woman, but now her thin, white hair stood out like a weak halo around her head, and her cheeks had lost their color. Her inky blue eyes were mischievous. She would wait for me to arrive in the mornings, standing in the doorway to her room, picking a little at some button on her dress.

“There you are,” she would say and motion for me to come inside.

I loved to talk with Agnes. At first, I didn’t quite grasp how serious her dementia was, so when she asked for a girdle (“because there are so many handsome men out there in the corridor”), I went out to the storage room and looked for one among the adult diapers, the pillowcases and the wipes.

“Where do you keep the girdles?” I asked. “Agnes needs one.”

The nurses nearly collapsed in laughter.

Agnes had a son – I can’t remember his name now – whom she often spoke about. She told me how well he did at school and how she had made a little skating outfit for him, for when she took him skating on the pond. The skating outfit was a dark blue with lighter blue stripes. She told me how they’d go have hot cocoa afterwards. I pictured a little blond boy with cheeks like red apples. And I pictured Agnes, a much-younger and very beautiful Agnes sipping hot chocolate in some café. I imagined Agnes in some fashionable winter coat and a stylish hat.

Agnes shared her room with a woman named Martina, who was almost completely deaf. Martina, or Tina as we called her, sat in an armchair all day long, with an empty smile on her face.

“I tell Tina she has to exercise,” said the ever-energetic Agnes. “I tell her ‘Jump a little up and down in bed, Tina’ but she won’t listen to me.”

I felt sorry for Tina where she sat in her own little world. Once I leaned forward and said loudly:
“What a lovely dress you have on today, Tina!”

She nodded absentmindedly. I doubt she had heard me. Agnes, however, had. Later that evening, when I had already gone home, Agnes got hold of a pair of scissors and cut Tina’s lovely dress to shreds.

There was also Water, an old man who surrounded himself with vintage photos in black oval frames and antique furniture that smelled faintly of wood polish. Walter always sat on his bed straight as an arrow.

“May I kiss you?” he’d whisper to me. “May I kiss you?”

He was a bit hard of hearing, Walter, so I nearly had to scream back at him:
“I DON’T THINK THAT’S A VERY GOOD IDEA BECAUSE I’M ENGAGED TO BE MARRIED SOON!”

The trick was to get him to talk about his youth. I loved hearing his stories, because Walter had been a tap dancer on Broadway back in the day, and he had once danced with Fred Astaire!

As summer progressed, I got more and more involved in the lives of these people. Agnes’ birthday was in August, and I gave her a pin with two bluebirds holding in between them a silvery ribbon. She was so young somehow, I felt as if we were friends. A few days later, the phone rang at home. It was Agnes’ son, who wanted to thank me for being so sweet to his mother. They’d like to meet me, him and his wife, and they happened to be down south right now. A meeting was arranged. I don’t know, but something died inside of me when Agnes’ son came towards me with a little bouquet of flowers, an outstretched hand and a formal smile. Agnes’ son was a retired lawyer. He was balding but youthfully tan from a recent trip to Tuscany. He wore a short-sleeved red Polo shirt and khakis. I don’t remember the wife at all. I don’t remember what anyone said. I just remember thinking that this then, was what had become of Agnes’ little boy in the homemade blue skating outfit.