I've mentioned before that since I retired from full-time college teaching I've been volunteering three mornings a week at a local hospice. Once morning a week, I take the dogs in too. I love doing this work; the house is a warm, friendly place, full of laughter and music and good talk and two resident cats. I learn a lot in the time I spend there. But this morning, I suddenly realized something that I think is important: Hospice is a place where we get to tell all our stories once again for the last time.
Everybody has a story to tell, but over the course of a lifetime we've probably worn out our listeners – family, close friends – from the repetition.Yet the stories remain important and powerful for us, and we yearn to tell them one more time. Or else there are family tensions that prevent the stories from being received – or received without blame and recrimination. Sometimes, a lonely soul will not have any one who ever wanted to hear the stories, or else everyone who matters has passed on already. What a burden it is to the soul to have life stories that have to go untold!
But in hospice there are loving people taking care of us and listening to us. And above all, there are volunteers whose sole job is to do whatever we need, and if that means listen to stories, they'll listen willingly. One of my favorite hospice patients was a ninety year-old gentleman who frequently said, “Oh, you wouldn't want to hear my boring stories!” But when he was assured I did, he gave me hours of wonderful yarns of growing up on a poor Illinois farm, living in a rooming house with other unmarried young men in Chicago and shyly courting the young ladies at social dances in the Roaring Twenties, running errands for the local Mafia, riding the rails like a hobo out to California to work in the (now non-existent) beanfields of Orange County, serving in the Navy during World War II. He seemed to have a need to put his whole life in perspective one last time, and I was happy to give him the permission, as it were, to do that.
I've heard stories about being a female impersonator in night clubs, a gay prostitute in Hollywood, the first Black, female mathematics teacher in her school district, a collector of semi-precious gems. I've seen photos of beloved pets and heard their stories. I've heard family anecdotes and family traditions, funny and sad. I've heard family ghost stories and strange experiences. Every day, it's something different.
And I see a great peace settle over people when they've had the chance to tell these stories they've been keeping inside their hearts, just one more time, or maybe for the first time ever.
If humans are language making animals, as Lewis Thomas calls us, then I would add that we are story-telling animals before anything else. It's a great privilege for me to share some of the vast stream of human experience through these stories.