Every Thursday since April I’ve been grocery shopping for a hospice client. I pay for the food with my own money and she Venmos me for “groceries—thank you!” alongside a GIF of a dancing bag of food. We’d never met before. We spoke once by phone. We mostly communicate via text. 

Groceries tomorrow?

That would be really great.

Thank you!!

I can make a grocery run today if

that would be useful. Feel free to

share your list with me.

Good morning Erin. Here’s

a list for you. We really need Stur—we

flavor moms thickened liquids with it.

My client, who is dying of Alzheimer’s, does not send me the list. Her daughter, Evelyn*, does.

Can you please add raisins?

 

Hi Erin—could you also

please get me a box of Prilosec?

Her grocery list is the longest text message I receive each week. I hold my finger down to copy and paste the entire length of her text to transfer it into the Notes app. As I walk the one-way aisles at the store and add each item to the cart, I delete-delete-delete until the list disappears. 

Where I shop depends on what she wants. If she wants the 2-pound bags of wild Red Argentine shrimp, I shop at Price Chopper’s Market 32. If she wants chicken livers or D-Mannose powder, a urinary health supplement for her mother, I stop by our local food co-op. Mostly I shop at Hannaford where they have a better selection of water enhancers on aisle nine, deli meat & baby swiss, and the mayonnaise that’s made with olive oil.    

As if I’m playing a video game, like Pac-Man, I snake through the aisles collecting wild kippers, jars of capers, turkey bacon, natural casing hotdogs (paper box), Mackenzie oven roasted turkey, Mackenzie honey roasted ham, imitation crab, wild lox, ground and golden flaxseeds, wasabi paste, nori wraps, and sushi rice. I steer my cart around each endcap with displays of potato chips and wine and know just how high up to reach for two boxes of generic Triscuits and how low to bend for a box of unsalted saltines on the lowest shelf. I know where the soft local wheat bread is, and the hotdog buns, and the TUMS (Smoothie flavor) in the medicine aisle. In the refrigerator section, I know which way the door opens to get the gallon of 2% milk and a quart of half and half. They prefer free range eggs—two dozen, but the rules change from week to week. There was one week they wanted three dozen, and the cashier took one of them off the conveyor belt putting it aside and said, “Limit is two,” without looking me in the eye.

Before I officially became a hospice volunteer, I had to complete an 11-week hospice volunteer training. I was still new to Vermont. When I inquired, they told me the training was full. Later that same afternoon, I got a call that a spot opened up. I drove north on I-91 to Bellows Falls every Monday for those eleven weeks. The training started at five o’clock and went until eight and was held in one of the retreat houses next to Stone Church. At 80 miles per hour, I drove up there and watched lush summer turn into a red and golden fall and then a brittle, icy-whitened winter.

We were a group of all women, an unusual circumstance our facilitators told us. There were two facilitators—Bettina and Karen—and seven of us volunteers. Then, six. One woman did not come back after the first week. Training was emotional. I left new in a way I hadn’t been new before lugging my exhaustedness at the end of each night like a rock with me back to my car. I drove home mute. I did not even open my mouth. Whatever we talked about that week—cancer, funerals, ethics and Act 39, family systems, boundaries, palliative care, listening skills, spirituality, pain, grief—settled like minerals in my body. I felt like depending on which way I moved the information was going to do one thing or another: fortify or destroy me. 

The training came at a good time. Like I mentioned, we were new to town. My husband had recently exited the Army. He transitioned out. His contract was up. For the last five years, we had lived near Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he was stationed as an active duty paratrooper in a parachute infantry regiment in the 82nd Airborne Division. Airborne meant he was trained to jump out of planes. It had been a difficult five years. I spent most of it missing him when he was away or once he was finally home, angry he fell right to sleep on the couch with “green and loam” paint crusting and still covering his face. It’s hard to talk with someone who is sleeping.      

All of the Army acronyms, it’s like learning a language, and what he told me, I couldn’t always track. Who is that? What does that mean? Is a Staff Sergeant above or below a First Sergeant? He said explaining it all to me tired him out. He was always so tired. Deployments and divorce and rising rates of soldier suicide frightened me as much as war. One night we went to a yoga class together. I was in child’s pose, my face buried into the mat, and someone was tapping me on the shoulder. “I got a Red Corvette, he whispered. “We’ve got to go.” A Red Corvette is a recall alert. They have a certain amount of time. Certain rucks and guns are already pre-packed. I rolled up my yoga mat and we both walked out.

Later, after having surgery in the Army hospital, I woke up in post-op with a drain in my throat and sweating through my thin hospital gown calling out his name. The nurse pulled my curtain back and asked if that was someone she could get for me in the waiting room. She came back empty-handed. “No one named Gabriel was there.” I spent a lot of time pretending to be braver than I was. I needed Vermont to be a place where I could re-introduce myself to whoever I had become. I was different now: five years older, somewhat broken, and mostly uncertain of what our marriage might be. Death’s pale scope of focus might get me back to some brighter way of being. Talking about death might revive me. It might revive us.

I also wanted to let you

know that we will have

raspberries very soon, which

you are welcome to pick. And

also if you like kale we have a ton

of that growing.

 

Oh, great thank you!!

As well as radishes.  

During hospice training, our chairs were arranged in a circle. I sweat through the back of my turtleneck when emotions swelled in my blood. When it was my turn to share, I avoided eye contact and when I started to cry I’d stare at a spot on the rug or up to where the ceiling met the wall. The women were gentle and kind and generous. We passed each other the box of tissues when someone needed them or inched a chair closer so someone could rub someone else’s back. The instructors had prepared one-inch binders for us with the syllabus and our weekly required readings. I kept mine open and wrote things in the margins like: 

Not to have things shushed up is healing

It’s gradual, a person doesn’t die and suddenly become as white as a ghost, up to four days

What is it like to witness this vibrant person fade

Once we touch the body of our loved one it’s not scary anymore

Each minute spent with a dead body is one minute more understanding that they are gone

Coconut milk—

unsweetened in a box or

can?

Box

The volunteer training ended before Thanksgiving and by then our group was akin to a sisterhood. We grieved the ending, as we’d learn to do. For the rest of the year, Monday evenings felt as hollow as a tree. There was no center. I’d catch myself, This is when I’d be heading out. This is when Bettina would strike the singing bowl. This is our moment of silence. This is when Karen would read the poem. This is when we’d break, all of us, standing in the kitchen—still alive—eating Cape Cod potato chips right out of the bowl or plates of quiche with eggs from Bettina’s farm and celery and hummus and olives and sliced apples and almonds and cheese and salami and candied ginger and sea salted caramels. Here we were together getting to know this thing called death. It wasn’t only knocking on the door. It was there with us already inside the room.

I was one of the youngest people in our volunteer training group, and when I shared what I was doing, a few friends wondered why as a 31-year-old I would be so interested in death. I just was. There was something gained by facing it. Head-on. Direct. I could do it. In the Army, death gets in there, even between your teeth. It follows you like a shadow. It hangs on you like film. You cannot shake it. And it’s not on the people who aren’t there. After Gabriel enlisted, I was still living in our studio apartment in Harlem. The recruiting station on 125th where he reported was on my way to school. I passed by each day as I walked to Columbia in Morningside Heights. I stopped in often and sat in the chair next to Sgt. Duarte’s desk, just to be there. “He’s not going to get shot,” Duarte said almost laughing, tossing a stress ball up against the wall. “What makes you say that,” I asked. “People think as soon as someone puts on a uniform, they’re already dead. I can see it. It’s written there all of over your face.”

It’s true. I worried about Gabriel constantly. Other spouses had their husbands go out for a training and come home with a TBI (traumatic brain injury). Guns misfired. Vehicles exploded. People could be careless. It could be as simple as “the summer is hot.” Dehydration. Overexertion. It could be a humid 12-mile ruck march. It could be a bad night jump. Land nav gone wrong in the woods. Anything, and you could wind up dead. Reality did not make anyone a promise. I fell while walking our dog in the country one day. An unleashed dog with eyes like lightning tore at us through its yard. While running away, I tripped. The leash was as taut as a rope in my hand, and I fell face-first onto the road. My forehead, a gash. My eyebrow, split in two. On the way to the hospital, Gabriel drove and I inventoried my worries. What if he hadn’t been home. Did it make it into my eye. Would I go blind. How bad was it. What about a scar. Would this make me ugly. What about my writing. If I couldn’t see, how would I be able to write? I held the washcloth up to my eye heavy and wet with my own blood and swallowed every question that came up as if they didn’t really belong to me.

The next day one of Gabriel’s soldiers shot himself in the face. Gabriel was the one who would fly the soldier’s remains back home. He would accompany him home. I drove Gabriel to the funeral home, so he could ride with the casket to the airport and then fly to Florida. He would stand on the tarmac and salute the body whenever it was loaded or unloaded off the plane. The day before Gabriel had spent the afternoon at the funeral home, verifying the body and fixing the mistakes on his uniform. My black eye was blooming and my forehead filled with blue stitches was swollen and while Gabriel was away I was terrified to go outside and walk the dog but there was no one else to do it but me. When I was in the hospital, they had me sit for X-rays. Head evaluations. Flashlights in my eyes. They took my blood pressure. They had me sit down. They had me follow them. I waited by myself in a chair in an empty hall. I wasn’t cold but I could not stop shaking. Now I know what it was: trauma rippling through me like a wave trying to figure out which part of my body it could burrow in and find itself a home.   

Before we became “official” hospice volunteers, they ran an extensive background check. They take a while, the hospice care coordinators said handing out paperwork when they came to sit in our circle and answer our questions. It was November. By January, I still hadn’t heard anything. Then, COVID. Hospice care suddenly looked different.  

As a particularly vulnerable population, hospice clients required a new and even more specific form of attention, but nursing homes, like anywhere else, were sources of spread, so they shut their doors and barred outside visitors—even family. People, and not just hospice patients, were dying alone. I had become a hospice volunteer so this wouldn’t happen. I had added myself to the listserv as someone who wanted to be notified for 24-hour vigil care. I said I would sit by their bedside, just to be there. Risk, now, was everywhere. Presence equaled suspicion. There were no protocols on how to handle this. “Pandemic, hospice care” was not in our training binder. The science and the CDC guidelines were changing every day.

Finally, I got a call. I passed the background check and John, my assigned hospice care coordinator, was wondering if I felt comfortable...grocery shopping. “This is a new need we’re realizing people have,” he said in a voicemail. “We’d be thrilled if you’re interested […] many of our volunteers are on the upper end of the age spectrum […] age is not the only risk factor and everyone is responding to this new world differently […] there’s really no pressure or judgement either way […]” I said yes. John connected me with the client and we had one phone conversation. “You can leave the groceries on the glass-topped table outside,” she said. “We so appreciate what you’re doing for us.”

Hi, Erin - if they have white

vinegar could you get two

gallons?

Sure.

I don’t see Clorox for Colors

here. Any other options?

No, that’s ok.

I don’t bring any reusable bags with me. We’re taking precautions against germs. In Vermont, there’s a ban on plastic bags. Paper ones cost 10 cents each. I usually have to buy about four, sometimes as many as eight. After I shop, I drive twenty minutes on Route 30 to get to their house in the woods. I drive along West River where people in the summer swim and sun and paddle their kayaks across the sparkling water. I pass brown, soft-looking goats in a paddock of clover. I pass cemeteries, gray headstones like old teeth, and a silver, lived-in Airstream with a stick wreath on its door in a driveway. There’s a farm with wooden signs at the end of their drive advertising what’s in season: organic vegetables, tomatoes, PYO blueberries, pumpkins. I carefully steer around bikers in their bright jerseys pedaling at the edge of the road.

One week, there was “Snack Factory pretzels” on the list. I figured this was a certain brand they liked, but I couldn’t find them in the chip and pretzel aisle. I pushed the shopping cart along with four 12-packs of seltzers clanking on the bottom grate to the freezer section to see if Snack Factory pretzels were a thing. They weren’t. I ended up buying Snyder’s, hoping they would suffice. When I unloaded the groceries, Evelyn came out.

“I couldn’t find Snack Factory pretzels. I got you Snyder’s instead. I hope these will be alright.” 

She nodded, rifling for the receipt through the paper bags. “Perfect,” she said looking up. “We remembered something this week. How much my mother loves pretzels.”

At a certain point in my drive out to their house, the music cuts off and the radio turns to static. There are wildflowers and boulders in the stream and dappled sunlight filtering through the trees. Gravel from the dirt road clinks against the bottom of my car. At the bottom of their hill, I’m watching a house get built. One week, they dug out the dirt. The next, they poured a foundation. Last week, I drove by glancing out my window to see a bright new layer of flat pink insulation. All houses are falling apart or being made new somehow. At the top of their hill, a text comes through. Evelyn-Hospice. I had texted her back at the store asking which flavor of sorbet they wanted. It only said “sorbet” on the list. Service is poor inside the store, especially in the freezer section. I read her text: Peach or raspberry. Another one comes through: Whatever you think looks good.

*This name has been changed for privacy.

Erin Pesut earned a degree in creative writing from Warren Wilson College and an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. Her writing has appeared on Vermont Public Radio and in Legacy Magazine, The Peal, Owl & Spade, and Classifieds: An Anthology of Prose Poems (Equinox Publishing). She was a finalist for the inaugural CRAFT Creative Nonfiction Award. Born in South Carolina, she now lives in Vermont.