We're All Living, We're All Dying

A speech for the Annual Laguna Honda Hospital Volunteers Luncheon, San Francisco, April 12, 1994

Some time back my friend Ellen Bruno became a hospice volunteer and began to tell me how great it was. I was sure she was saying this only to make me feel bad, and so I dedicate this speech to her. Not everyone at Laguna Honda is a saint. There may be one or two others like me who volunteered to work here for all the wrong reasons.

A year and a half ago, when Ellen finally shamed me into the training that would eventually lead me to Ward O-4, my thoughts on the matter were all in a muddle. For instance, I imagined in some idiotic way that there would be something awfully good about doing this sort of work. You know, "good" like cod liver oil is supposed to be "good": awful, and therefore enriching to the spirit. I'll admit too that I had a grim fascination with sickness and death, precisely because they are hidden subjects in our culture, almost taboos.

Where there are taboos, of course, there are fears. I had to the nth degree the horror that most everyone feels in the presence of death, a lingering childish insistence, I suppose, that I'm different, that mortality is for others but not for the great and indispensable me. I was afraid I would become too attached to people and that the pain of their dying would be too much to bear . . . and yet at the same time, I feared that I could never really become attached to them, as if there were something fundamentally alien about people at the end of their lives.

Such were my thoughts -- stupid, vain, fearful, ignorant -- as ugly a collection of human motivations as you'll find anywhere . . . but hey, they were good enough to get me started.

The training I received from the Zen Hospice Project was immediately and permanently useful in helping me clear out all this psychological undergrowth. Frank Ostaseski told us a story about a volunteer who had been helping a patient from his bed when the man slipped and fell onto the floor. Frank paused, and the whole room full of would-be volunteers sat in silent dread. Then Frank continued: "So, the volunteer picked him up." We practically cheered with relief.

Motives sort themselves out very quickly once the work begins, and the focus changes from me-me-me and my reasons, to others and their needs. "Helping work" is absorbing in a way that cannot ever be anticipated. How could I have predicted falling in love with Juanita, a tiny Salvadoran woman who presided like a bed-ridden Mayan queen over the first year of my work at Laguna Honda, imperiously commanding me to fry up a batch of bananas so that I could enjoy them with her grandchildren? How could I have known that Jo Dulski would turn me into a compulsive hugger? Who would have guessed that Richard, my "buddy good and true" whose face was collapsing with cancer, would post a small sign over the empty socket above his smile: "I'll keep an eye out for you"?

As Eileen Lemus, our Hospice Volunteer Coordinator, keeps reminding us, the learning never stops here. A few months ago, when Richard was close to the end, I whispered to his nurse that I was afraid Richard wasn't comfortable. "Michael," Nahidi told me, "Richard is fine. It is you who are not comfortable." What a revelation this work is: the main thing about these "dying" people is that they're also living people just like you are and I am . . . and in much the same way, you and I and everyone else are also dying, just like the patients. We're all scared of death. Almost no one is entirely ready. Everybody is living and dying.

It's curious: I almost always walk out of hospice feeling wonderful -- glad for my health, glad not to be in pain, glad for life. The very fact of being alive is so wildly and absurdly improbable that I sometimes feel like we're all sweepstakes winners, and that death is less tragic than life is miraculous. There's an old Shaker saying: "Live every day as though it were your last, and as though you had ten thousand more to live."

Ten thousand thank-yous to the Zen Hospice Project and to the staff, volunteers, and especially residents of Laguna Honda Hospital.

Berkeley, California

April, 1994

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