THE ROOM SMELLED OF SMOKE. It’s a familiar smell, and no longer one I hate, although that was something I had to get over. I do still hate it when my clothes smell of it later.

“Mind if I smoke?” she asked, and while if she had lit up without asking I wouldn’t have said anything, I was jolted into truthfulness.

“I’d rather not,” I said. “Would you like a piece of nicotine gum?”

“I can’t,” she told me. “I don’t have any teeth.”

Oh. I had known that. I hadn’t thought. “A pouch, then?” I offered.

“What are those?” she asked, staring at it distrustfully as I explained.

She did take one, although she had trouble managing it in her toothless mouth, and stood in front of me while we talked, pacing restlessly. It did nothing for her. Eventually she spat it out with a sigh.

I wished, later, that I had let her smoke. Wished I hadn’t let my desire to smell clean take priority over her comfort. Wished that the class-based gap between us didn’t feel, at times, like thick plexiglass.

I practice what I think of as a simple thereness with my patients. I listen; I consider; I advise; I do my job, but mostly I just try to be there. With them. In the smoke.

But it’s not as easy as that, really. There’s a lot of letting go. Letting go of the idea that I am there to save them (that one left a long time ago); letting go of the idea that we can fully understand each other (that one was harder); letting go of my own fussiness and preferences (harder still, and ongoing). Letting go of things I didn’t even know I was holding onto.

We hold these things so tightly, these little preferences. About how clean the floor should be or how well scrubbed the pans or what, exactly, the air should smell like (nothing, preferably, or perhaps a whiff of essential oil). We cling so hard we think these things are us, our identity — the books on the shelves, the music on the stereo, the well-chosen food in the fridge.

They aren’t. They are nothing. The gap between me and my patients sometimes feels like thick plexiglass but it is a mirage. Pulvis et umbra sumus. We are dust and shadows. Dust, shadows, and the grace of God.

I wish I had let her smoke.

Image Credit: Jill Burrows, Pexels