The two of us sat at her round wooden table, a young man and an elderly Italian woman, and she told me about her husband, a man she was married to for fifty-three years, and who had died nine years ago. Between sentences she slipped individual pills between her lips, sipped at a glass of water, then continue detailing the attributes of her happy marriage. Her husband’s black and white face grinned at us from a framed photo on the wall, and her eyes latched to the image as she spoke, a small sad smirk to her mouth.

I pulled her heavy medical folder in front of me and she fell quiet as I wrote about the care I had administrated that day. From the silence she said this quote, nodding at the folder, and I was pleasantly surprised by the accuracy of her observation.

“The story of my life is getting longer.”