“I thought that at my age I could no longer cry,” said Frau Bienkowski. “But this morning, the tears came.”

Frau B had spent the whole day trying to get hold of a packet of sanitary towels because ever since her hip operation, she has been unable to retain water.

But the person in charge of making the fortnightly order was on holiday and nobody had thought to take over his duties.

In the end, one of the volunteers popped over to the chemist’s to pick some up. They weren’t the right kind, but they would do for now.

“I’d be lost without Frau Lintz,” said Frau P of the lady in question.

The nursing home is short-staffed because there have been an unusually high number of deaths over a short space of time, leaving several rooms empty.

Frau B’s egg timer. Source: http://www.amazon.com

Money is tight and management won’t increase the staff-patient ratio. So when a certain number of residents die without being replaced, the carers lose their jobs too.

Death at the nursing home is a small table placed outside a bedroom door. On it is a candle and a framed photograph of the deceased.

A few months ago there was a table outside the room opposite Frau B’s.

“The lady across the way died,” Frau B said, matter-of-fact.

And another time she said: “Every night when I go to sleep I pray that I won’t wake up.”

In other circumstances, the sentences might sound tragic.

But if I have learnt anything from my weekly visits, it is that welcoming death is not the same as abandoning life.

Frau B and I are seventy years apart but we talk like sisters – about boys and clothes and death and what’s in the news.

image source: centralavenuepub.wordpress.com

We laugh out loud at the absurd hen-shaped egg-timer she’s been given instead of an alarm clock and I bring her several packets of the sweets her doctor has told her not to eat.

We continue reading the book about the cantankerous Irish nuns, even though we get through about ten pages each week and I’ve been paying library fines for months.

Recently, we found out that we both get dressed up for my visits.

“Sure who else notices what I’m wearing?” Frau P asked with a smile and I told her I felt the same way.

So if death is a small table, life is the perm Frau B insists on getting touched up every week.

And the moments we spend laughing at silly hen-shaped egg-timers and the humiliated tears we shed about elusive sanitary towels are the beautiful and tragic bits that happen in between.