This semester, I’m taking an introductory creative writing course. Each week, we are asked to write short pieces of nonfiction, responding to prompts designed to get our ideas flowing, reflecting on our past experiences. Last week’s prompt was to write a letter to a stranger: someone we had met only briefly, but who had some effect on our lives. After thinking for a while, I decided to write to one of the hospice residents I visited in my freshman year, through my CBL Montserrat course: Death and Society. It’s a raw, fairly unedited piece of writing, but I wanted to share it here as I continue to grapple with how to put my CBL experience into words.
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To the woman who died six hours after my visit
I don’t remember your name. Actually, maybe I never knew it. They’d rather us just know initials, because of HIPAA regulations. You were my only “emergency” patient. I’d just been making my normal weekly visit with your neighbor down the hall — we’ll call her Olga (HIPAA again). Olga was my first hospice patient. She spoke only Russian, but we’d managed to build up some level of rapport, using a mix of google translate and Tchaikovsky music. Despite her advanced dementia, Olga seemed to know who I was each week and started calling me “my girl” every time I came to see her. It made me feel good to be recognized.
But this week, Harriett the volunteer coordinator, had asked me to visit you, too. You weren’t doing well. For a hospice patient, this was an especially serious description. I walked down the hall toward your room, wincing at the huddle of patients in wheelchairs around the elevators, longing to see a visitor. Like every other room in this nursing facility, yours looked more like a hospital than a residence: powered bed, hand-rails on the wall, pastel wallpaper, faint smell of urine masked by lemon disinfectant. A crucifix — definitely yours in this Jewish facility — hung on the wall. You were sitting in your wheelchair, painfully thin and hunched. Your mouth constantly moved as you muttered under your breath. Your eyes roved, seeming to focus on me for a second, but then looking away. Did you even know I was there?
I sat down in the metal folding chair next to you and tried to think back to my seminar class. It seemed incredible to me that what I was doing right now was part of a syllabus: hospice volunteering, 15%. We were studying death and dying, what it meant to die a “good death,” but here I was confronting this question in a decidedly non-academic setting. What was I to do? There was no professor, no trainer here to guide me. All I had to go on was your patient file that said you were a devout Catholic.
I took your hand, remembering from dementia training that touch could be powerful when words weren’t an option. Your muscles were tense, your hand crumpled up but began to relax as I rubbed back and forth with my thumb. I hope I was being gentle enough. I took out the plastic rosary the facility chaplain had given me on my first day, and placed the beads between my hands and yours. You looked at me and clutched the beads. I said the Rosary prayers, praying for you as I said the words. The whole time I felt unsure: should I stop, did you even know what was happening? At the end, you made the Sign of the Cross on your own. I guess you did know.
A week later, I visited again. We prayed the rosary again. I sang to you a little. You continued to mutter under your breath — the only word I could make out was “wonderful.” But you did not make the Sign of the Cross this time. A few hours after my visit, I received a phone call that you had passed away, and I cried a little back on my college campus. I hope someone was there with you when you died. I hope your death was easy. I hope my awkward, college freshman presence was somehow pleasant and not disturbing. I don’t remember your name, but I will never forget the way we met.
