That Smell

A speech for the Annual Laguna Honda Hospital Volunteers Luncheon, San Francisco, April 22, 1998

Remember the very first time you came to Laguna Honda? Remember how the building looked imposingly huge, almost fortresslike? Maybe that was twenty-eight years ago, as it was for my shift partner, Jo Dulski. Or maybe you're just starting out this week, as it is for the fresh batch of newly trained volunteers in the Zen Hospice Project. In any case, I'll bet I know the first thing that really hit you when you came in the door: it was the smell, right? That hospital smell of piss and flowers, hope and despair. It was an unmistakably institutional smell. Remember the hollow sound of voices echoing down these long corridors?

Everything seemed strange and scary to me on my first day as a volunteer. Exciting, too . . . but mostly strange and scary. I had just undergone two weeks of intensive training at the Zen Hospice Project's guest house on Page Street. Our instruction had ranged from the practical details of how to change bed linens, to the spiritual challenge of how to confront our own fear of death. We were told that by observing sickness we learn that health is precious; by observing death we learn that life is a miracle.

In retrospect, I think it was a wonderful introduction: they told us that we shouldn't be afraid of making some terrible mistake, that it is everyone's human birthright to know how to assist the sick and the dying. They told us everything that they could have told us . . . including, rather ominously and cryptically, the fact that there was only so much they could tell us. We would just have to do it, and then we'd know. Damn.

So there I was in the hospice on my first day, terrified of making a mistake, terrified by the scary strangeness of everything around me, terrified of the institutional bulk of the hospital, terrified of that smell! Let's face it: the idea of hospice is terrifying: people are dying there. Well, of course: they're human. Humans die. The terror of coming to hospice isn't a terror of seeing other people's deaths; it's a terror of seeing our own deaths. As long as we have two good legs, we can run away from our own fears, and can hide the way a baby hides -- by covering up our eyes.

So there it is, the inescapable logic that all living things, even healthy, good-looking young things like us, must eventually die. The training we get from the Zen Hospice Project teaches us to lower our hands from our eyes and acknowledge the truth of what we see. And yes, just as we'd feared, we see living people dying. But we soon begin to see something else, something wonderful: dying people living. Even through the pain and the thousand indignities of illness, the patients in the hospice are miraculously, brilliantly alive, and there can be no more beautiful "job" in the world than to be witnesses to the stubborn persistence of life. Who's witnessing whom?

After a while, coming to Laguna Honda stopped being scary and became downright ordinary. Like everyone in this room, I learned to push myself past my fear, past the urge to believe that none of this sickness and dying had anything to do with me, past even that inevitable smell. In time I learned the wonderful secret of hospice work: that the medical staff has the daunting job of making this a place for dying well; our "job" as volunteers is to make the hospice a place for living well.

Sometimes when I arrive at Laguna Honda and the sun is shining and I'm glad to be here, I catch myself thinking I've grown awfully callous about this work . . . but now I wonder: was I more callous -- deeper in my denial, more parsimonious with my compassion -- before becoming a volunteer, or now?

I really don't know how to answer that. I just know what everyone in this room knows: that my own life got a bit better -- a bit richer, a bit fuller -- the day I began volunteering at Laguna Honda.

Berkeley, California

April, 1998

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