*I do not remember her last name. I have thought about it many times. I remember everything else.*

I have been trying to write this for about two years.

My name is Beverly. I am sixty-nine years old and I live in the house in Savannah, Georgia where Thomas and I lived together for thirty-eight years. Thomas passed away in the spring of 2021. He was sixty-nine years old, the same age I am now, which is a thing I think about sometimes.

He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in November of 2020. He told me sitting at this same kitchen table, on a Tuesday afternoon, after the appointment where they confirmed it. He put both hands on the table and looked at me the way he always did when something was serious and he said: “It’s bad, Beverly. It’s pretty bad.”

I put my hand on top of his. I said: “Okay.”

That was all I said. Okay. I do not know if that was the right thing to say. I have gone over it many times. I think it was the only word I had.

We decided to do home hospice. That was a conversation we had in January of 2021, when it became clear that the options were narrowing. Thomas had been very clear from the beginning that he wanted to be home. In our bedroom. In the bed where we had slept together for thirty-eight years, under the quilt his mother had made us for our wedding that we had been using ever since.

The hospice agency sent a nurse three times a week. They sent an aide on the other days. I did the rest.

I do not say that to make myself sound remarkable. I say it because it is the truth of what caregiving is. It is the medication schedule and the repositioning every two hours and the keeping track of the breathing and the watching and the staying up when you should sleep because your body will not let you sleep. It is the particular exhaustion of being vigilant all the time. Your nervous system does not know how to rest when it thinks it needs to keep watch.

By the first week of April, I had been awake for most of three days.

The hospice nurse that Thursday morning was a woman named Carol. I never got her last name. She came early, around four in the morning, which was not unusual toward the end : they came when they were needed, not on a schedule.

She went in and checked on Thomas. I heard her moving quietly in the bedroom the way she always did : efficient, unhurried, gentle.

Then she came out into the hallway and saw light coming from the kitchen.

I was at the kitchen table. I was not doing anything. I think I had made a cup of tea that I had not touched. I was just sitting there, which is something I almost never do.

Carol came into the kitchen and pulled out the chair across from me and sat down. She did not ask permission. She did not say anything at first. She just sat down the way you do when you have decided you are staying for a minute.

Then she put both hands flat on my table.

She looked at me.

She said: “You are doing everything right. There is nothing more that love can do, and you are doing all of it.”

I have replayed those two sentences an extraordinary number of times.

I had not cried in three days. I do not entirely know why. I think I had some idea that I needed to be together, to be steady, that if I fell apart Thomas would feel it somehow. That my grief was something I needed to manage carefully so that it did not leak into the room where he was.

When Carol said those words, something in me just : let go.

I put my face in my hands and I cried the way you cry when you have been holding it for three days. Not pretty. Not quiet.

Carol did not rub my back. She did not say “it’s okay” or “he’s at peace” or any of the things that people say. She did not try to fix it or redirect it or shorten it. She just sat at my kitchen table at four in the morning with her hands flat on the surface and she let me cry until I was done.

When I lifted my face she handed me a paper towel from the holder on the counter. The paper towel had little roosters on it. I remember that very clearly.

“You need to try to sleep a little,” she said. “I’ll be here.”

“I can’t,” I said.

“I’ll be here,” she said again. “Try.”

I did not sleep. But I lay down on the couch and I closed my eyes for a while and something in me was slightly less wound up than it had been. Because someone had come and sat down and told me I was doing everything right, and I had needed to hear that more than I had known.

Thomas passed four days later. It was an early morning, the light just beginning to come in through the curtains. I was sitting beside the bed and I had his hand and I felt when he was gone.

I have thought about Carol many times since then. I have thought about the particular gift of what she did : not the clinical skill, not the medical knowledge, but the decision to sit down. To not say the hollow things. To say the true thing instead.

I do not know if she knows what those two sentences meant. I suspect she does not. I suspect she sat down at many kitchen tables at four in the morning and said the thing that needed saying and then went on to the next house. That is what people like her do.

If you are a hospice nurse, a hospital nurse, a home health aide, a caregiver of any kind : I want you to know something. You may not remember the specific kitchen tables you sat down at. You may not remember the specific things you said.

The people at those tables remember. They will remember for the rest of their lives.

I remember Carol’s face. Round, kind, glasses with a thin silver frame, a little silver in her hair. I remember her hands flat on my table. I remember exactly what she said, word for word, in what order.

I do not remember her last name. I have thought about it many times. I would like her to know that she helped me get through the last four days I had with my husband. I would like her to know it was enough.

It was more than enough.