Letter to a Client, Long Gone

I work with cancer patients, hospice patients, and people who are in extremis. I am regularly asked things like “How can you handle that work?”, or “What do you do when someone dies?” This letter to one of my former clients is yet another attempt to answer those questions.

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This is how I knew that you had died: your husband called me. He used your phone, so I knew to answer the call. I was not surprised to hear his voice instead of yours, since you had missed our last few appointments because you were too fatigued. He told me that you had passed away, just the night before. He seemed collected until I thanked him for calling me, then he started to sob so much that he just hung up the phone.

Just the week before your husband had called me on your phone to see if I would come to the house to give you a massage. You were too weak to call for yourself, he said, and you had family visiting for a while. He felt sure, though, that after they left you would want a massage.

There were many things about you that brought me joy, but one of them was not even you — it was your husband. The way he looked at you. Even when you were half-asleep in a lounge chair, connected to an IV line with your bald head covered by a crooked felt cloche, he looked at you with the purest love and…