Unexpected

I'm slowly getting the hang of working at the B&B. How to make sure your scrambled eggs don't stick, how to properly fold fitted sheets, the best way to pad out a slow day when you want to work at least four hours, how to deal with disorganized bosses... it's all pretty routine. But today I had a very disturbing experience that taught me that B&B work is sometimes far from ordinary.

Over the past week I've gotten to know a rather fussy and passive-aggressive guest who's been in the B&B for a few weeks now, as her husband was in the hospital just down the road (since Vancouver's main hospital is so close, we get quite a bit of business through family wishing to be nearby). She hasn't been the easiest guest, requiring her eggs done a certain way, having a lot of calls, always needing to speak to us about something she's unhappy with. But I've put up with it, not only because she's a guest and you don't yell at guests for being horribly passive aggressive, but also because underneath all of it there was a deep and worrying sense of sadness about her. So when she vaguely waved at me to come out of the kitchen this morning, her face lined with stress in a way I hadn't seen before, some part of me knew. Or at least, some part of me feared.

Her husband died in hospital last night.

Suddenly, this woman (whose first name I don't even know) is a widow, and I was one of the many things she had to deal with when clearly all she wanted to do was curl up in a ball and forget the world. She couldn't even look me in the eye as she explained what had happened and that her sister would be coming in and she didn't know if her sister would want her own room, or a cot in her suite, or what. I assured her that I would make a room or a cot available if she needed it, and I tried with every power of body language and tone of voice to radiate my compassion. But other than that I could do nothing.

By the middle of the day, when my coworker and I quietly made up a cot and put it in her room, she was beyond rational thought or decision. She wandered around in slippers and a housecoat, and crawled into bed right while we were in her room. She was quite literally mad with grief. It was awful, and while her quiet 'thank you' as we crept out of the room made me think she might one day recover, right now she's going through a hell I can't even imagine. All I can do is pray for her, pray for sleep and rest and some sort of helpful grieving process. But that seems so little, and her pain is so large.