phil, i hardly knew you

i remember when i interviewed to volunteer in palliative care, i thought that what i wanted/needed/felt compelled to do was to bear witness. see a life through. sit with. be with. stand by. i remember being asked what i thought it would be like, and tentatively imagining the way small comforts could mean something so much bigger at the end of a life. i thought about the stories that needed to be told, or the silent being-with that might lessen the fear that must always, somehow, accompany the closing in of the inevitable. i thought mostly that the significance of the work there lay in being of service to the dying.

of course, i had a personal stake. for me there was the death of my own mother to contend with - that i missed it, that i was not able to sit with for her, that i missed the long goodbye. i figured that spending time in palliative care might stand in for some of that, allow me a proxy with which i could exorcise some of that impotent love/grief/care that i've carried around for a good number of years now.

and this is going to sound trite, but what i hadn't envisioned - and i mean really envisioned - was how changed i become in doing it. how those small comforts and conversations with the dying become part of *me*, part of my ongoing memories. the dying die, and with them go the only other witnesses to those moments, which in the grand narratives of their lives play no role at all. but i've got memories now, laid out in a small shrine to the scraps of lives that i've been given by people i know hardly at all.

so thank you, ursula, who never did get that nail moved out of hospital room wall. and thank you, joan, who was so concerned about disturbing her roommate with her 2 am near-death experience which came only days before the real one. and thank you, phil, who showed me his wounds with something close to pride, who could talk a blue streak through the morphine, who asked me sheepishly a few weeks ago to be his date for his daughter's july wedding, and who died two months short of it. i had thought you had more time. i'm sorry i didn't get a chance to say goodbye.


dylan - knockin' on heaven's door