Three days a week, I gave my time to a hospice group, sitting with people whose days had grown quiet and small. Most of them were elderly or seriously ill, and what they needed more than anything was someone to fill the empty hours, to remind them that the world had not entirely forgotten they existed. I brought groceries, washed dishes, folded laundry, and mostly I listened. People at the end of their lives have a great deal to say, and almost no one left to say it to.
I had come to the work honestly, if a little accidentally. My own mother had died in a county facility when I was nineteen, alone, because I had been too poor and too overwhelmed to be there the way she deserved. I never got over the particular shame of that. Volunteering was, I suppose, my way of paying down a debt that could never really be settled. If I could keep even one stranger from dying the way she had, maybe the arithmetic of my guilt would come out a little more even.
That was how I met Carl.
He was assigned to me on an ordinary Tuesday in early spring, a name on a clipboard and an address in a part of town I did not know well. His apartment was on the third floor of a building with a broken elevator and a stairwell that smelled of old rain. When he opened the door, I remember being surprised by how young he looked. Most of my clients were well into their seventies or eighties. Carl was perhaps forty, maybe a year or two past it, with the kind of face that must have been handsome before the illness came and started taking pieces of him.
He had terminal cancer, the file said. Pancreatic, advanced, no family listed, no emergency contact, no one. That last part was what got to me. There is a specific loneliness to a man in his prime with an empty contact field, and I felt it the moment I stepped into his small, tidy rooms.
But Carl was not what I expected. I had braced myself for bitterness, for the anger that so often comes when death arrives decades too early. Instead he greeted me with a warmth that felt almost practiced, as though he had been looking forward to my arrival for a long time.
“You must be the volunteer,” he said, and something flickered across his face when he looked at me, something I could not name then and would spend a long time trying to understand later. “Come in. I made tea. I hope you like it strong.”
I did like it strong, as it happened. That was the first of a hundred small coincidences I would only recognize as coincidences much later.
We fell into an easy rhythm over the following weeks. I came on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, and Carl was always ready for me, always dressed, always with something planned. He loved board games with a passion that bordered on the childlike. We played endless rounds of backgammon and an ancient, dog-eared edition of Scrabble whose box had been taped together so many times it had lost its original color. He kept score in a little notebook, and he cheated constantly and badly, and when I caught him he would laugh so hard he had to hold his side where the pain lived.