I’m an LMT and a few months ago I began volunteering for hospice. I provide massages to patients in the final months or weeks of their lives. I meet them long after the awful diagnosis has been given, long past any possible hope for recovery. By the time we meet, they know that time is short and that every moment left is precious.

There’s a particular peace that emanates from someone in this, last stage, of life. There’s also a keen noticing that goes on. I see the way they watch the noontime light in the garden, or how their head tilts slightly toward the overheard voice of a loved one. It’s truly beautiful, this appreciation and acceptance of the smallest of things. Giving up control is the hardest part. But my clients embrace the surrender that surrounds them.

A few weeks ago, I saw for the first time a man stricken with advanced dementia. No longer able to walk, I massaged him from a seated position in his wheel chair. Despite the bleak circumstances of my being there, the time I spent with him and his wife was sweet a respite. After 25 years, my husband and I were separating. I’d moved out, and was somewhat homeless, couch surfing and airbnb-ing, until finally, I’d landed in a furnished sublet apartment. It has been quite an unsettling thing for me, and yet, here was this couple, in their 70s and 80s, my client and his wife of fifty years, gracefully coping with the day to day struggles of approaching death. Despite the uncertainty, the timing, despite all the new faces and accents coming in and out of their home, the nurses, practitioners, assistants, social workers, cleaning ladies, now feeding, dressing, soothing, my client. Despite the busy-ness of dying, my client and his wife remained calm, remained one.

On one afternoon, when my client needed to take some medicine, but wasn’t in a mood to cooperate opening his mouth, his wife took the syringe from his nurse, held it to his mouth and said sweetly, but sternly, in their native German, “Open.” And like a little bird, the 83 year old dying man did what he was told. This moment was so intimate, the trust between them so visible. At the beginning of perhaps, of the end of my marriage, I was witnessing true commitment. The wife returned to the kitchen and I reached for my client’s hand. I thought about their love and this house filled with keepsakes from a lifetime of travels. Books, paintings, carved furniture. I thought how unfair it was that she was losing this man that she loved so dearly. And I, was ending a marriage that I didn’t hold dear enough. A tear slipped down my face. And when it did, my client, riddled with dementia, turned his gaze toward me. And with the slightest movement, touched his finger to his cheek. He’d felt my sadness.

He passed away two days after my final visit. The last time I saw him, he was bedridden, connected to oxygen and morphine. They say that the dying need permission to go and that our life force leaves us through the head, the crown chakra. So on that last day, I held his hands, gave him permission and massaged his head with a bit of lavender. I told him, go. Be well. Your work is done. You have loved. Very well, you have loved.