Three Visits

Into another room . . .

The house is a ramshackle structure containing worn-out furniture and peeling paint…

First visit.

There are four small rooms and a bathroom. The house is a ramshackle structure containing worn-out furniture and peeling paint. One of the rooms is a bedroom, jammed with a double and a single bed. The cramped space has no air conditioning and the outside triple-digit temperature is forcing itself inside. A man is alone on the single bed. He is dying, but I look into his eyes and see life.

Second visit.

Another place welcomes me after the outside security gate is unlocked. I enter through the front door—with more locks—into a spaciousness cooled by silent air conditioning. The office I walk by on the way to the bedroom is filled with framed photos, awards and citations. All of the office’s memorabilia surround an immense desk. In the master bedroom, past the office and past a solarium with its filtered sunlight, a hospital bed holds a man. His face turns toward me as I enter. He is dying, but I look into his eyes and see life.

Third visit.

The wife tells me her husband isn’t up to meeting me. “Please sit wherever you want,” she says. I choose the sofa. In the middle of the living room floor, a freestanding fan hums and swirls. By the front door, a glass-walled cabinet displays wedding photos. After leaving momentarily to help her husband, she returns and sits near me. I share information about hospice. Attentive and alert, she nods her head as she listens. In a room I have not seen, her husband rests. He is dying, but I look into her eyes and see life.

One day. Three visits. The first was a new patient. Yesterday, he told the nurse about being, “scared shitless of dying.” Barely fifty, he lives in near poverty. The second was a man I visited numerous times. In his mid-seventies, his house reflects a lifetime of success. The third visit was for sharing basic hospice information. Though I never saw the patient, his chart noted he was in his sixties. His wife, across from me on that sofa, listened to every word I said about what hospice could do for her husband and their family.

When I first started working in hospice in the late 1990s, my older sister’s reaction was: Won’t you be depressed all the time? On the surface, it would seem inevitable she’d be correct. I could have guessed I’d visit families where someone—maybe fifty or half that age or even twice that age—was dying. And I could have guessed I’d enter houses where one place might have paint peeling from the walls and another a sun-dappled solarium. But now, having visited so many people, one thing I know for certain is what it means to sit down by someone touched by life’s final moments.

I meet the eyes of family and friends, of patients and potential patients. Tears flow, or are withheld. Floating in those tears or near tears, like a lifeboat overwhelmed with too many passengers, are dread, anger, hopes, longing and exhaustion. And more. I look into the eyes and there’s no poverty or luxury, no age, no difference in skin color or religious background or sexual orientation or any other distinctions we too often use.

• I look into the eyes and see what matters.

• What can I say that will be completely honest?

• What can I do that will truly help?

Shouldn’t it be like that every day, with every person? Each moment we are alive, as we see the other, we can see ourselves.

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Photo by nine koepfer on Unsplash

My book, A Companion for the Hospice Journey is available at Amazon.