After much consideration, Margaret decided that she missed being able to talk slightly more than being able to walk. She had a great deal of time to consider such things. In fact, Margaret had nothing but time now. Now extremely elderly and frail, Margaret spent her days in an ugly blue medical gown confined to a rather uncomfortable hospital bed.
The only people that Margaret saw on a regular basis were various hospital employees in heavily starched white uniforms which seemed to be made of ice. It seemed to Margaret that all the staff members that dealt with her were growing increasingly distant and formal. At times, they seemed almost sullen. It felt like they had written her off and were waiting for her to die so they could give her bed to someone with more of his or her life left to live.
Earlier in her hospital stay, Margaret had actually received a few visitors. Tiffany, who was Margaret's roommate in the nursing home that Margaret's mother and grandfather had stayed at before Margaret, had come a few times with a bored staff from the home who usually seemed extremely anxious to leave as though being in the hospital made them uncomfortable. Max, a young man from Margaret's church who had done chores for her before she had moved into the nursing home, had visited her once. He had brought a potted plant, struggled awkwardly to find something to say, and left eagerly when his father came to pick him up. The youngest of Margaret's daughters, Patricia, had stopped by a few times in what seemed to be an attempt to fulfill her family duty and keep her conscience from bothering her. Originally, Patricia came by every day. That turned into every other day, then once a week, and then once every other week. The day that Margaret had last had any visitor whatsoever seemed like an eternity ago and was getting to be extremely difficult to recall. Margaret found that this applied to most aspects of her current life. It was growing increasingly more common for Margaret to realize when the nurse was bringing her dinner that she was no longer able to recall what she had for breakfast.
Oddly enough, however, Margaret found that it was far simpler to recall events that actually did happen a long time ago. It seemed as though the longer back she thought, the easier it seemed to be to remember. Margaret did not spend the majority of her time focused on Gerald, her late husband. She found that she hardly ever caught herself thinking of him or any of the kids that the two of them had together.
Margaret discovered that most of the time her thoughts turned to her youth and the times she had growing up with her family. They seemed like such colorful, larger than life characters. It now felt to Margaret as though nothing about those times was real, as though it was all a fiction that someone dreamed up. As Margaret went over those times in her head, it seemed as though they were poised to stay the same ages forever and continue having the same sort of wacky adventures until the end of time.
That, of course, is not what happened. Margaret and her siblings left home when they grew older. Although they occasionally all got together on holidays, the connections between all of them weakened drastically. The world began to seem more drab and less exciting. The illusion that life seemed to progress in a logical, orderly fashion evaporated. It seemed as though Margaret grew a little more bitter and empty inside with each bill to pay and each pointless errand to run. The world around her, which once seemed so bright and vital, quickly started appearing dull and gray.
How she had turned from the wild, smiling youth which she was into the broken-down old woman confined a hospital bed that she now was remained a mystery to Margaret. This was what she seemed to find herself wondering about most of all. Margaret still felt like she had yet to come up with a satisfactory answer to all of this when her heart finally stopped beating and her mind went blank.