When I was in grade 5, my best friend’s brother died of leukemia. Death came so close, and yet my world remained untouched. I went to school the next day and continued with my activities without missing a beat. My home life with parents and two brothers was strangely unchanged. There was no talk of death or the fallout of grief, he just vanished. This distancing — this lack of knowing even though I knew — left me to imagine what had happened. I held my grief in secret, my door closed, in my room with red and white heart-pattered wallpaper. This combination of fear rooted in vulnerability and unwitnessed grief created a storm of confusion in 10 year old me — a storm that lasted over a decade.

On the day of my first shift as a volunteer at the local hospital, I found out that I was assigned to work in the palliative care ward. I was terrified. My job was to push a rattling cart down the hospital hallways and enter patient rooms to throw out old bouquets and refresh the water in the flower vases. I was terrified and then I was surprised.

Those death rooms, spaces that I had imagined being full of horrible things — unbearable sights, sounds, and smells — were, in reality, almost completely filled with tender moments; expressions of love, forgiveness, gratitude, sacred silence, hands nestled in hands, and hearts cracked open. There was a softening and a falling away of the stuff that doesn’t matter, revealing what really does matter, which was almost always relationships. I noticed how the limitation of time seemed to help people recognize what is asking to be brought into the world. Priorities presented themselves allowing what mattered most to arise to the surface: Love. Surpassingly, these rooms were almost always full of different expressions of giving and receiving love.

From that moment, I became dedicated to helping others understand the nature of gentle dying, and the beauty and healing that so often exists alongside the pain at end of life. Offering a more balanced narrative, one that is more rooted in love than fear is the loving force behind all that I do.