Your Masterpiece Lives On
Chapter 1 — The Only Thing That Helped
I was twenty-nine years old, and still trying to find my way through the grief of losing my mother.
Grief, I had learned that year, is not a thing you get over.
It is a thing you learn to carry, and in the early months I did not carry it well; it sat on me like a stone, and the ordinary machinery of my life ground slowly to a halt beneath its weight.
Nothing helped.
Not the well-meaning advice, not the sympathy cards, not the passage of time that everyone promised would heal what did not feel healable.
And then, almost by accident, I found the one thing that made the pain feel as though it had some purpose.
I began volunteering at a hospital.
Specifically, I began spending time with the patients who had no one, the ones who were dying, at the ends of their lives, with no family beside them, no visitors, no hand to hold.
