When my parents hear that I’m sick, it goes like this:

“Did you take your vitamins? They really help! Here, write this down.” And this is followed by a precise list of which bottles I need to buy and how many capsules of each I need to ingest each morning, noon, and night to obtain healing.

And when I’m really sick, the miserable, here-for-a-while flus that happens once every two or three years, the recommendations escalate, but take the other route.

“Do you need a Z-Pak? Maybe go to the doctor for a Z-Pak! Your cough is coming from so deep down, all the way from your toes — do you feel them curling?”

When my in-laws hear that my husband is sick, however, it means one thing: baggie time.

My darling mother-in-law, the eternal nurturer, tends to have a full stock of all sorts of cure-alls, and when my husband visits with a little sniffle or cough for company, he’s sure to be gifted a baggie holding an assortment of colored capsules.

He’s never quite sure what they are, but he makes sure to pop two or three pieces of motherly love right away. The remainder waits patiently on the counter, growing fewer every day, until the nearly empty bag (for it’s never entirely empty) joins the others in the far corner of a kitchen cabinet.

Every time I come across these bags, I first check to see if I know how to identify them based on their color. Taupe? Hm. Greige? Hmm. Some odd shade of mustard? Hmmm! Then I shove the bags even deeper inside the cabinet.

Come Pesach time, we find we have a whole collection of ziplock or twist-tied bags holding single pieces of immune boosters, probiotics, and complexes (the other kind). Then they sort of move from here to there for a few months, before we gulp them down — “To health!”

One lovely day, however, the script changed. This time, I got sick, and soon my husband appeared, toting a small baggie of capsules, courtesy of his mother.

When I caught sight of the bag, I almost didn’t feel the soreness of my throat, the discomfort in my chest. All I could think was, these are for me! For me!

I still don’t know what these capsules contained, but you can be sure I swallowed them. Because now, gifted with a baggie of my own, I finally recognized the contents for what they were: love in powder form packed into tiny capsules.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 788)