Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
Notes of the Hospice Volunteer
A volunteer at a seaside hospice keeps a notebook of the requests the dying make for small things, and every request is granted by someone who has already died in the room before.
- dated: The last weeks of the autumn rota
- narrator: Joyce Penn, hospice volunteer
- reliability: reliable
Monday. Sat with Mr Halloran in room seven for two hours. He is eighty-eight and has been waiting for his daughter to visit since August. He asked me to read him the racing results from 1961, which he said his father used to read aloud at breakfast. I did. He smiled through all of it.
Tuesday. A new patient in room three, a young woman with a cough that will not go. She asked for a cup of tea with two sugars, which I made, and when I came back with the tray the room was empty. Nurse Okafor said the bed had been stripped that morning. The tea was still hot.
Wednesday. Mr Halloran asked for his pipe. I told him the hospice has a strict rule about smoking. He laughed and said the rule was only for the living. When I came back in the evening there was a pipe on his bedside table, unlit, with a cloth folded beneath it. Nurse Okafor said she had not seen it before, and that it smelled of tobacco from a brand that has been out of production since the seventies.
Thursday. Mr Halloran died at four in the afternoon. His daughter had not arrived. I stayed with him until the porters came. Before they took him away, he opened his eyes and asked me, very clearly, whether I had remembered to bring his coat. I said I had. He nodded and closed his eyes again.
Friday. There was a coat folded on the chair in room seven. Grey wool, a good cut, with a handkerchief in the breast pocket. I had not brought it. Nobody on the ward recognised it. But the handkerchief had his initials embroidered in the corner, and the cloth smelled of pipe smoke and lavender.
Saturday. Asked Nurse Okafor about the room. She said room seven had been empty for six weeks before Mr Halloran came, and that the previous occupant had been a retired railwayman, who had asked for a timetable to be read aloud every night. She said he had died in the same bed, and that the staff had found his pipe in the drawer afterward, and that nobody had been able to throw it away.
Sunday. The young woman from room three came back to the ward this morning, sitting up in the chair by the window with a cup of tea on her knee. She looked at me and said, quite cheerfully, that she had been waiting for the sugar. I brought her a spoon. She stirred the tea three times and said it was perfect, and that she would like to go home now, if the doctor agreed, because she had left her coat somewhere on the seafront and did not want to be late for the tide.
Monday. Room three is empty again. The tea tray is on the sideboard. On it is a cup, full, with two sugars already in it, and a note in a neat hand that says *Please keep the room warm for the next one. The sea's very high tonight.*