The Honor of It

This morning I sat in a parking lot that holds a lot of history. And a moment that held a lot of weight.

I sat in the car a little longer than I needed to. Some mornings ask you to pause before you step into them. This was one of them. Beyond the windshield, an ordinary-looking building on an ordinary street. Inside it, work I had been missing in a way I hadn’t fully let myself name.

Today, I returned to hospice.

Not as a leap. Not as a pivot. As a coming home.

Earlier this year, I closed a chapter so I could open another one fully. I gave myself — finally, completely — to the leadership coaching I had been building on the side for too long. A platform. A framework. A language for the kind of leadership I wish more of us had been given earlier — one rooted in internal capacity, not just external performance. I poured myself into it because I believe in it. I still do. The work I do for healthcare leaders, especially those serving in hospice and palliative care, is some of the most meaningful work of my life. It is not a side project. It is a calling.

And still. There was an ache I couldn’t quite name.

Something in me had been asking a question I wasn’t ready to answer out loud. Not should I go back — but what part of me has been waiting?

It turns out, the part of me that has always been a hospice nurse first.

I have worn many titles over the years. Director. Founder. Leader. Coach. But underneath every one of them, in the quiet of my own knowing, the identity has never moved. I am a hospice nurse. I will always be a hospice nurse. Whether I am at a bedside, behind a podium, in front of a camera, or writing curriculum for the next generation of leaders — that is the lens through which I see this entire field, and this entire life.

So today I picked up that part of myself again. The role is small — barely even part-time. A handful of hours. But the hours are not the point. The return is the point. I am back at the bedside, in some measure, alongside the platform I will keep building.

Two halves of one calling. Finally in conversation.

People have asked me, more than once recently, some version of the same question: How do you do hospice? Isn’t it depressing?

I have struggled to answer that question well. Not because the answer is complicated — but because the answer is sacred, and sacred things are hard to translate into ordinary words.

What I can tell you is this.

There is something about being present with another human being at the end of their life that rearranges you. Not in a sad way. In a clarifying way. The noise drops away. What matters becomes very, very obvious. You stop being in a hurry. You start being useful in a way that has nothing to do with fixing and everything to do with witnessing.

To be invited into that moment is one of the great honors of a life. To help someone have a beautiful death — and yes, there is such a thing — is an honor. To sit with the people who will be left behind, and walk them through something they will carry for the rest of their lives, is an honor. To work alongside the nurses, social workers, chaplains, aides, and physicians who do this quietly and faithfully, day after day, without applause — is an honor. To teach and support the leaders who hold all of those people up — is an honor.

I keep using that word because it is the truest one I have. Honor. This work is not depressing. This work is one of the most luminous, most human, most clarifying things a person can do with their hours on earth. It is heavy, yes. It asks a lot of you, yes. But it gives back something most jobs cannot give: the steady knowledge that what you did today mattered.

The place I returned to today is one of the original homes of this work in our country. A nonprofit. A mission older than I am. A place tied to the names and the convictions that made modern hospice possible in the first place. I won’t speak for the organization — that isn’t mine to do — but I will say what is mine to say: to stand where this movement was planted, even quietly, even part-time, is a privilege I do not take lightly.

This field carries a legacy. Florence Wald. The nurses, physicians, and chaplains who insisted that the end of life deserved dignity, presence, and care. They built something sacred. The rest of us are stewards of it. Every hospice professional working today is — whether they think about it this way or not — carrying a piece of that legacy forward.

I want to honor it. And I want more people to honor it.

Hospice is not a footnote in the continuum of care. It is one of the most essential chapters in it. The people who do this work deserve our protection, our investment, and our reverence. Not just on the days we lose someone we love. Every day.

So here is where I am tonight, on day one of something that doesn’t actually feel new — it feels recovered.

My cup is full in a way it hasn’t been in a long time. Not because anything was wrong before. But because something I had set down, gently, was waiting for me to pick it back up. And today I did.

I get to build. I get to teach. I get to lead. And I get to be present at the bedside.

Both hands full. Both halves honored. Exactly where I belong.

It is, and always has been, the honor of my life. 🤍