Collecting Last Words

She had worked in palliative care for nineteen years and she wrote everything down.

Not the clinical stuff. That went in the charts. She wrote the other things. The last words, the last jokes, the last requests.

A woman who asked for a window opened because she wanted to hear rain one more time.

A man who spent his final hour trying to remember the name of a dog he'd owned when he was seven. A yellow dog, he kept saying. A yellow dog with one brown ear, and she had sat with him through it and the name never came back to him but he had smiled anyway, as if the trying had been enough.

People who called out for their mothers.

People who called out for their children.

People who said things in languages she didn't speak, that she transcribed phonetically and sometimes looked up afterward.

She had six notebooks.

She didn't know, exactly, why she kept them. She wasn't planning to publish anything. She didn't think it was her story to tell. Something in her couldn't release it, couldn't let all of it just dissolve into paperwork and memory, and after some years she stopped questioning the impulse and simply followed it. The notebooks lived on a shelf above her desk at home. She didn't reread them often. Knowing they were there was enough.

The work itself was not what people imagined. People imagined it as heavy, as something that would hollow you out over time, and it was heavy. It was also its own kind of privilege, being present at the edge of a life. She had watched people leave the world with grace and with fear and with confusion and occasionally with what seemed like genuine relief. She had learned things she couldn't have learned anywhere else. She had learned, for instance, that almost no one's last thoughts were about money, or about the arguments they'd had, or about the petty accumulated grievances of a life. They were almost always about people, and moments, and small private things that had somehow held more weight than anything else.

In her thirty-seventh year of nursing she sat with a man whose family hadn't come. She didn't judge the family. She had seen enough to know that the relationships between dying people and the people who loved them were not simple, were often not hers to understand. She held his hand the way she held everyone's hand, without making it into something, and she talked to him quietly about small things. The weather outside, the bird she'd seen on the window ledge that morning, the fact that she'd made a good soup the night before and was looking forward to the leftovers.

He opened his eyes once near the end and looked at her with the particular clarity that sometimes came in those last minutes, as if everything unnecessary had already been set down.

He said, clearly and with effort. “It was worth it.”

She asked, “What was?”

He was gone.

She wrote it down when she got home. She sat at her kitchen table with the sixth notebook open and wrote the date and what he had said. She didn’t write his name in the notebooks. She had never written anyone's name. That had been her rule from the beginning, the one privacy she could preserve. She wrote what they said and who they were in the way that mattered, and she left the names out.

She sat for a while looking at the sentence on the page.

She thought about the six notebooks on the shelf. All those voices. All those last things offered up in small rooms to whoever happened to be present. The woman who wanted rain. The man who wanted the yellow dog's name.

She thought, Was it?

She didn't have an answer. She wasn't sure the question had one. She closed the notebook and went to bed and lay in the dark and held the question. She had learned enough by now to know that some questions weren't meant to be resolved. Some questions were just meant to be kept, the way she kept the notebooks. The way she kept showing up.