Scrolling through these old threads feels like picking at a scab that refused to heal 3 years ago. I’m sitting in a plastic chair that squeaks every time I breathe, holding a smartphone that belongs to a man who died 23 minutes before I clocked in. My name is Riley D.R., and as a hospice volunteer coordinator, I spend a lot of time in the wreckage of other people’s digital lives. Usually, it’s a mess of unanswered emails and half-written drafts that will never see the light of a sent folder. We have this collective delusion that life ends with a period, a neat little dot that signals the completion of a thought. But it doesn’t. It ends like an abrupt disconnection during a tunnel, a jagged edge that cuts anyone who tries to smooth it out. I’m looking at his last text. It was a complaint about the soup. Not a grand farewell. Just a note about too much salt, sent to a daughter who was likely 13 miles away in a grocery store aisle.

The False Comfort of Closure

I’ve been reading my own messages lately, too. Texts from 2013, back when I thought I knew what ‘ending’ meant. I was so arrogant then. I used to tell my volunteers that our job was to help people ‘find closure.’ What a stupid, hollow phrase. Closure is something we invented so we can sleep at night without hearing the echoes of everything we didn’t say. In this ward, closure is as rare as a quiet 3:03 a.m. shift. Most of the time, what we get is just an interruption. I’ve seen 43 people pass away this year alone, and not one of them had a movie-moment epiphany that tied their life into a bow. They just stopped. They left the TV on, or they left a book marked at page 123, or they left a browser tab open to some corner of the internet they weren’t supposed to be visiting.

I think about that $13 bet he placed. I think about the 3 unread messages from his sister that he ignored because he was too busy trying to beat the odds. We judge people for how they spend their final hours, as if there’s a rubric for dying correctly. There isn’t. My job isn’t to guide a soul; it’s to make sure the physical residue of a life doesn’t get tossed in a dumpster before the family arrives. I’ve spent 53 hours this week just filing papers that prove people existed. The routine is brutal. It’s a sequence of checking boxes and signing names, a method of accounting for a loss that can’t actually be measured. I hate the word ‘method’ almost as much as I hate ‘closure.’ It implies there is a logical way to handle the fact that the person in Room 3 is no longer there.

The Brutal Inconvenience of Now

Sometimes I get angry. I read my old texts from that period of my life when I was still trying to be perfect, and I want to scream at that younger version of Riley D.R. I was so obsessed with the unfolding of a ‘proper’ career. I thought if I followed the 23 steps of the volunteer handbook, I could solve death. But death isn’t a problem to be solved; it’s a condition to be witnessed. The contradiction is that I still carry that handbook around. I still check the pulse, even when the machine is flatlining. I still tell the 13 new volunteers that they need to stay hydrated and take breaks, knowing full well they will go home and cry into their dinners because no amount of water can wash off the smell of a sterile room.

There is a persistent hum in these hallways. It’s the sound of oxygen machines and the squeal of cart wheels that haven’t been oiled in 3 months. It’s the soundtrack of the ‘in-between.’ People think hospice is about the end, but it’s actually about the excruciatingly long middle. It’s the 43 minutes you spend waiting for a nurse to bring a fresh pillow. It’s the 3 days a patient spends staring at a crack in the ceiling because they’ve run out of things to think about. I read a text message from a woman who passed away last Tuesday. It was to her gardener. She was arguing over the price of mulch. $63 for three bags. She died before he could reply. That’s the reality of it. We are arguing about mulch and salt and $3 parking fees right up until the moment the screen goes black.

Trust Built in the Small Things

I find myself wondering what my own last text will be. Will it be something profound? Unlikely. It’ll probably be a reminder to buy milk or a complaint about the 3-cent increase in gas prices. And that’s okay. There’s a strange beauty in the mundane. It’s the proof that we were actually living, not just performing a role. Mr. Henderson didn’t win that final bet on the site he was browsing, but the look of anticipation on his face was worth more than the $373 he might have taken home. It was a moment of genuine engagement with a world that was trying to tell him he was already gone. He wasn’t gone. He was right there, clicking a button, hoping for a 3 to show up on the screen.

The Mess is the Only Truth

I’m tired now. I’ve been awake for 23 hours, and the air in this office feels like it’s made of lead. I look at the phone in my hand again. I should put it back in the plastic bag. I should label it with the room number and the time of death-which was 3:43 p.m. I should go home and delete my own old messages, the ones that make me cringe at how much I used to care about things that don’t matter. But I won’t. I’ll keep them. I’ll keep the 73 unread notifications and the 3 drafts of an apology I’m too stubborn to send. Because that’s what makes us real. We are a collection of unfinished stories, and the interruption is the only thing we can truly count on.

If I could tell those 13 volunteers one thing-and actually make them hear it-it would be this: stop looking for the light at the end of the tunnel. Just learn to see in the dark. Learn to appreciate the fact that the man in Room 53 is still swearing at his nurse. It means he’s still here. It means the story hasn’t been cut off yet. We spend so much energy trying to make sense of the sequence, trying to find the ‘why’ in the 23-page medical history. There is no ‘why.’ There is only the ‘now,’ and the ‘now’ is often loud, smelly, and incredibly inconvenient. I used to be afraid of that. Now, I find it comforting. The mess is the only thing that isn’t a lie. The neatly folded blankets? Those are the lie. The reality is the 3 crumpled tissues on the floor and the half-eaten cup of pudding that was too sweet.