Things are different now.

My friend’s cancer is spreading and inoperable; she is now considering hospice and the hospital’s own palliative care. It is not curable.

As it turns out, the doctors have been fantastic, they have shown great compassion, honesty, and an openness to consider any good options.

I need to put my past hospital battles and prejudices away; times are changing. I am sorry for the diagnosis but relieved to hear about hospice.

There are not many options.  My friend and her family will decide. It doesn’t look like going home is one of them.

For me, this is now a very different thing. Any complexities or difficulties of the past do not matter; the quirks and difficulties of human beings are put aside and no longer matter.

I put on my Hospice Volunteer hat now, and Zinnia and I will go to work. I am happy to do that, I am good at it, I’ve been doing it for more than a decade,  and I can be helpful.

This is a sorrowful story for my friend, for Maria, for me, for her friends.

I have learned not to be shocked or surprised by life or deaths, the mission now is to work towards what is curiously called a good death, which is a comfortable death, as painless as possible.

And when you are older and live with dogs, death and loss are not strangers.

I fully embrace the hospice idea of Active Listening, an approach that has been profoundly helpful for hospice work and also for the rest of my life.

My job is not to offer hope or false assurances or to offer much of anything more than my ear and the presence of my dog. I am ready, and Zinnia seems born for the role.

Active listening is harder than it sounds. It takes time and patience to learn.  It involves listening with all senses, including eye contact. The patient must know and see that they are being heard.

Interest is conveyed by using both verbal and non-verbal messages – even eye contact, nodding my head, smiling, encouraging the patient to talk. I’m not there to say everything will be fine because it won’t be, and the patient knows it better than anyone. I’m not there to cheer anyone up, that’s Zinnia’s job.

Active listening is not something that just happens (that’s called hearing), Active Listening is a dynamic process in which a conscious decision is made to listen and to understand the message of the speaker.

It is not a conversation; it is the opposite of a discussion in some ways,

We have made contact with our friend’s family, and I hope they will soon be on hand. I agreed to be a  health proxy and will work to carry out my friend’s wishes. Her closest friend also signed, she has to go home tomorrow, she is caring for her mother.

Today, we cleaned up the house, set the thermometer, shoveled some snow, alerted the neighbors, held the mail, found a foster home for the dog. That was hard; it fees like the dismantling of a life. My friend keeps saying she expects to be home on a day or so, no one is lying to her but she isn’t ready to hear it.

I’ll visit my friend tomorrow; she is still struggling to understand what is happening. I think that’s a task for the professionals, but we’ll see.

Things are different now.  I went to the Mansion this afternoon to say hello, Madeline was waiting for me at the door. “It’s about time you showed up,” she said, “we wondered if you were ever coming back.”

I’ve only been away a couple of days, I said. But that can seem like a long time to people at the edge of life.

“Well, good,” she said, “you better be coming back.” You know, I said, it’s good to be missed. I need to get coffee creamers for the Mansion aide Break Room and a medium pink sweatshirt for Burt.