I knew he was close. His breathing had changed, but I also knew it could be hours. It was 4:30 on a Friday afternoon and I was ready to be done with my week. The apartment was full of friends and family, full of an energy that was neither nervous nor productive. It felt like the buzz of being. The man’s wife and daughter were in the bedroom with him.

In the February issue Reflections essay, “The Car Ride Home,” author Paige Fletcher movingly evokes an episode from her experience as a hospice nurse. This one-page essay, which will be free until the end of February, is written with unusual clarity and restraint and is well worth the five or 10 minutes it takes to read it.

Fletcher writes convincingly of a sense of sacred space and time that can emerge as a life ends in a supportive home hospice setting. And she describes her role, knowing when to listen and hang back and when to make the small gesture or guide the family in the next steps.

Two levels of experience.

Is there a bridge between such heightened experience and the ordinariness of how we experience daily life? As she leaves the family’s home near the end of the essay, she interrogates this question without illusions:

The world outside had no idea what had just happened. They carried on getting gas, honking at red lights, and crossing the street like life is not fragile. I tried to absorb these feelings and this sense of sacred space and time. But soon I too would be swallowed up with grocery shopping and the other mundane life events that make life.

What does such a story have to do with how people are dying now?

Any reader will be struck by the contrast of the gentle, communal setting Fletcher describes with the constraints on human contact that the pandemic has brought us for these past 11 months. But maybe these worlds still have something in common. Here are some follow-up comments from the author about our current situation in light of the topic of her post::

I wrote this essay to be included in my memoir of my hospice work. As I reread it now during the COVID-19 pandemic, I am struck by its contrast with stories of dying we are hearing from hospitals all over the country. People isolated from their loved ones, alone at a time we would want to be near. The hospice care setting is so different from the acute care setting. The anxiousness of ‘what-if?’ is removed and it’s only a matter ‘when-how?’ ‘When-how?’ also holds anxious uncertainty, but in this uncertainty, there is also hope. Hope is what our loved ones and caregivers bring to us in our final hours.

And now I see the stories of doctors, nurses, all the medical professionals bringing hope to people in the end. They connect loved ones by video, bear witness to goodbyes, soothe the dying with medicine, word, and presence. And while even now much of the outside world may be carrying on, getting gas or honking at red lights, we see the loss, and we collectively hold the space. We witness the hope, the life, and the love. In the end, even in an end separated from those who love us, all that is left is love.

If you like podcasts instead, you can listen to an AJN editor read aloud this short essay and other recent Reflections essays as well. They are all collected on this page.