I am floored by the love shown by people in front of the dying, who are helpless, vulnerable, and in some cases unable even to acknowledge they are in the room. Perhaps it's because I do similar work that I think I understand what motivates them. It feels really good when we're thanked, but that doesn't always happen, and at times we are the unknown workers behind the curtain who are simply finishing what someone else started. But somehow that counts for something too. My singing voice is worn and off-key and I can't hear what I sound like at all. But I have sung out some people, usually with my favorite hymn "Spirit of Life," and I have relaxed them with my speaking voice, sometimes reading, sometimes just talking. There's a quality to being human, as one person here says, that makes us givers. And there's a need to being human that wants others with us in our frightened periods. It's located in seeing death, as one woman says, "not as an event, but as a process." Without locating it in a religion, this is God's work, a direct result of that theology that wrestles with how to account for little children dying painfully.
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