Chapter 1 — The Hospice

Two years ago, after my mother died, I began volunteering at a small hospice on the edge of the city, because I did not know what else to do with the grief.

My mother, Claire, had been my whole family, the only family I had ever known, and when she was gone the apartment we had shared went so quiet that I could not stand to be in it.

I was not looking for meaning, exactly, or for healing, which I did not yet believe in.

I was looking, I think, for a place where death was ordinary, where people did not flinch from it or hush their voices around it, where the enormous thing that had happened to me was simply the everyday weather of the building.

A hospice is that kind of place.

It does not pretend that people are going to get better.

It only tries to make the leaving gentler, to surround the end of a life with a little warmth and dignity instead of fluorescent panic, and there was something about that honesty that I could breathe inside of, in a way I could not breathe anywhere else in those first raw months.

So on my days off from the small jobs that paid my rent, I would put on the volunteer badge and walk the bright quiet halls, and I would sit with people the world had mostly finished with.

I brought them water and coffee.

I read to them.

I sat with them in the long afternoons.

I listened, which turned out to be the thing most of them wanted, more than anything else, at the end, to be heard by someone before the silence came.

I did not expect to find anything there for myself.

I certainly did not expect to find my whole life waiting for me in a small sunlit room at the end of a hallway, in the person of a fifty-nine-year-old man named Julian, who had, though I did not know it yet, been waiting for me for twenty years.

I have thought a great deal, since, about the strange grace of grief, the way it can lead you, blind and stumbling, to exactly the place you most need to be.

If my mother had not died, I would never have gone to that hospice.

If I had not gone to that hospice, my father would have died alone in a room a few miles from the daughter he crossed twenty years to reach, and I would have gone the rest of my life believing the lie that had been built around my childhood.