Ticket to Change

She settled into the chair across from my desk and we began our conversation. There was nothing particularly extraordinary about her except a brilliant smile that took up all the empty space in my office. One of the questions that I ask when interviewing potential volunteers is a simple one, yet, it’s the kind of question that opens the shades to some very deep windows, if you have them. “Can you tell me about a significant loss in your life?” The goal is to see if the individual is far enough away from a death in their own life to be emotionally ready to work with those in end of life care. My words barley cleared the air between us when she said that it was her father. “He was the loss of my life!” Her tears came out of hiding; they glistened like stained glass windows dripping colors across the memory that I now felt in the room with us.

Witnesses would tell her that 4 high school students that didn’t want to pay to get into a football game began to harass her father who was selling tickets. When things didn’t go their way, it got physical. The witnesses said that one of the teens pulled out an iron pipe and in a random act of violence landed a decisive blow to the back of her father’s head. This beautiful African American woman with buttery skin and a well-seasoned vocabulary went on to tell me about one of the most fascinating men that I will never know. She spoke with careful words about how wise her father was and that he took time to discuss what truly mattered most to him with each of his 5 children; she was his third child and first daughter which created an especially close bond with him. That night at the gate he was left brain damaged. Her pain seized me with a riveted attention. Instantly, the family went from a financially comfortable living to barely scraping by on one income. Her father was in the hospital for a year before being placed in a facility and would die three years later never to regain control of his mind or body again.

Although it had been decades ago, I found myself gently tracing the well-worn labyrinth of pain she had walked for years. Her tone softened as she went on to tell me that it was her last weeks of college when her father passed. Her mom fearing that the end of his life was near called all of the children home, all except her. She adjusted herself in the chair, took a deep breath and tightly clutched the purse laying across her lap. Looking passed me to the window she said, “They all got to say goodbye to my dad and have those last important words but I didn’t.” Her mom had decided that interrupting the last weeks of college might impede her graduating. Forgiving her mom had been a steep slow hill for her to climb the years following her father’s death, and judging from the anguish entangling her words of regret; I felt myself understanding the few years of estrangement she took from her mom. The relationship would be repaired with much work and time. Today they enjoy weekly visits and she fully expects to care for her mom when she reaches the point of decline but at 85 seems to be going strong.

She regained her composure after the unexpected question and I asked, “What was the greatest lesson you learned from losing your father?” She said that it was the blessing and gift of his sharing what mattered to him. At each moment in her life when she found herself backed into hardship’s corner, she would hear the wisdom of her father’s words from long ago applying, still, to her life circumstances. It renewed her hope and belief that she could make it through her problems. On occasion, she confessed, “I’ve felt his presence so close to me that it moved me to tears.” With that, her brilliant smile; in a wave of optimistic candor, rushed back into the room and pulled mine across my face as well as she said, “I’m never really alone!”

I wasn’t expecting this mild ordinary looking woman to shake me so thoroughly, but, propped up on thick sturdy legs in this woman is a story worn with a blue-collar understanding; at any given moment life can come off its axis. Her father left her a treasure chest of wisdom for those occasions.


She is going to make an amazing volunteer for our patients in end of life care.

Mona McPherson