As a massage therapist for Hospice, I visit you in your daughter’s home; McMansion. $2M at least, plus the thousands spent at Home Goods for decorative wall art. You lie there, slowly succumbing to the cancer that invaded your breast last spring, while you and a friend toured Spain and Italy. Travels you’d put off for nearly too long. Now, you rest in the large sunroom that used to be for recreation, your wig, your nail polish, your bedazzled baseball cap on the covered billiards table. I work delicately. Massaging your hands, your feet, while a woman, not the one you gave birth to; she’s asleep on the family room sofa, sits and waits. Your aide. She has traveled all the way from her home in Uganda to tend to you: check your tubing, administer your meds, keep your mouth and tongue moistened. Last visit, you were engaged, chatty. But today, you sleep through the massage. While I work, your aide listens to a live church service via the internet from her congregation back home. Miracles are everywhere. In this too big room, in this too big house, the afternoon sun glares at us, bakes us. Not unlike, I imagine, the African sun she’s remembering. I watch: her hands reaching up into the air and waving. God is good! Her face beams with light from the song of her choir, 6,000 miles away. And across all that distance, for a moment, in this room, with your life nearing it’s end, we give praise.

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.

I’ve heard recommended a few times recently that if you’re writing a story, or planning an event, it helps to start at the end, see the complete vision, and work your way backwards, thus creating the pathway for arriving at your destination.

The Ending. That’s the hardest part. It’s blurry. I can’t quite fathom it. Beneath my senior yearbook photo, my future plans read, *Small, midwestern liberal arts college (name withheld to protect the innocent), Psychology, Fall in love, Be happy.

No mention of kids, or marriage, specifically. But I definitely got those. Graduated, too, though not as a psych major (a crush on a boy DJ on the campus radio station, lead me to the Communications department. I wound up a Mass/Comm major.) I did the fall in love thing and got married after college, though the “be happy” bit has been more of a challenge.

I guess true happiness, or true love, remains elusive when, deep down, you expect that it will come from somewhere or someone outside of yourself.  And in order to get love, you really have to be able to first give it, starting with yourself. Unlike that scene in When Harry Met Sally, self love isn’t so much something you can fake, cause you’d know. So, really really, you have to believe that you are worthy of love.

It’s a terrifying idea, worthiness. And yet, I have many friends. Even now, as I’ve been trying on transparency in my relationships, telling the whole truth and being completely vulnerable, revealing warts and all, I am learning that I am worthy. In fact, my friends who loved so called, “perfect me,” still love “flawed me,” maybe even, a little bit more so.

So I guess the sign that hung in my childhood kitchen was true: Not the one that said, “Fuck Housework,” though I could get behind that concept. But rather, the one with the little skunk that said, “A friend is someone who knows all about you, but loves you anyway.” Shouldn’t THAT be the kind of friend that I am to myself? Whoa, isn’t that what God is? Someone who knows all about you and loves you anyway?

A friend shared this beautiful Hafiz poem earlier today:

You could become a great horseman
And help to free yourself and this world
But only if you and prayer become sweet lovers.

It is a naive man who thinks we are not engaged in a fierce battle
For I see and hear brave foot soldiers all around me going mad,
Falling to the ground in excruciating pain

You could become a victorious horseman
And carry your heart through this world
like a life giving sun,
But only if you and the Great Spirit
become secret lovers.

What if, rather than being in control, rowing upstream, I put the oars inside the boat and just see where the current, the love, takes me? What then? Maybe then, I’ll be able to begin, at the end of my story.

(Blog post title borrowed without permission from Dar Williams. Though I don’t think she’ll mind terribly).