The first time I visited ‘Anna’ at Sunrise of Haverford, she was watching the Winter Olympics. When I asked what she did for fun, she told me there was nothing to do for fun around here. I pressed gently, asking about music, and her face shifted. Yes, she said, she liked the Beatles. As we talked more, she mentioned that her knee was bothering her, and then, in a moment that has stayed with me, she asked if I would rub it. That she asked at all meant trust had been built, and I felt in that moment the weight and the gift of what it means to truly reach another person.
Over our visits, ‘Anna’ shared more of herself. She had spent years in government service but had never married and never had children. She carried a wound that was decades old, for instance a mother who had favored her brother. Her brother visited occasionally, but there was still a careful distance. Sitting with her, I found myself moved by the fact that Jesus Christ died that for ‘Anna’, for this particular woman with her particular wound and her particular loneliness.
Thomas à Kempis teaches in the Imitation of Christ that temptations prove and purify our virtues in ways that comfortable ease never could. The saints understood something that takes real experience to learn, that a virtue never truly tested under pressure is not yet fully yours. This year, in prayer and in examination of conscience, I began to see where my patience was actually thin and where my humility was more self-image than substance. Confronting those temptations honestly, cooperating with the grace being offered, was the slow interior work that made those virtues more mine than they had ever been before, and I found that breaking through one wall of the self made the next less formidable.
My own mother and I have a close relationship, and it was hard at first to empathize with ‘Anna’. I feel called to medicine, but I feel called even more deeply to one day be a wife and mother, and I believe those callings form rather than compete with each other. Sacrifice is the grammar of love in both, and every hour spent learning to sit with suffering, to stay present when it would be easier to retreat, matters. Staying present with ‘Anna’ through my own discomfort was its own small asceticism. ‘Anna’ opened up about her brother, her mother, the long years of feeling unseen, and she began reaching out to him more.
I thought often of Our Lady standing at the foot of the Cross, what it must have truly felt like to watch your own son suffer and die before your eyes, the child you carried and nursed and raised, and to be utterly unable to stop it. She could only remain, immovable in love, present in the darkness, her heart pierced as Simeon had foretold. That is the model of accompaniment that no clinical training can give you. To sit with the dying, to ask about the Beatles, to rub an aching knee when someone finally trusts you enough to ask, these are not interruptions to serious medicine but the very heart of it.
This hospice year showed me myself more clearly than I expected. I leave it more patient, more humble, and more certain of my vocation, all of my vocations, knowing that God is present in this work, and that every grace given and received in a quiet room at the end of someone’s life is making me into who I am called to be.