My Calling

During Hurricane Katrina, my college apartment in Baton Rouge was a refuge to four households of family members and their pets. Every home was inundated with floodwaters. In the weeks that followed Katrina, everyone moved out and began rebuilding, except my Great Aunt Sis.

Prior to moving in, I hadn’t known Aunt Sis well. She was a fringe character to our family life because even as an elderly woman she was quirky and strange. She’d never married, struggled mightily with psychiatric disorders, and mostly kept to herself. But after Katrina, we became roommates for about 3 months.

At that time, I began to see signs that Aunt Sis was suffering greatly. I saw firsthand how systems work for and against the elderly and the infirm. Eventually, I found Aunt Sis a bed in a long-term care facility, a real win in post-Katrina Louisiana, but highly contested by Aunt Sis.

Aunt Sis lived in that facility for the next 12 years. She never softened in her anger toward me but she was never able to live on her own again either. In 2018, a nurse at her facility called to recommend Aunt Sis begin receiving the support of hospice. I began visiting as often as I could and I learned about all the things we death workers are experts in, at the bedside of my aunt: legacy projects, advanced directives, stages of dying, after death wishes, etc.

I also had a front-row seat for some difficult decisions that we had no written guidance on. When Aunt Sis was diagnosed with a UTI just before she began actively dying, did we want to treat it with antibiotics? When Aunt Sis began refusing liquids, did we want an IV? How do we create a soothing and beautiful space for a person dying in a state-funded institution?

Just before Aunt Sis died, she asked that I keep her ashes and her son, a stuffed blue duck named Paul, that she dressed and cared for as if he was a baby. In her honor, and in gratitude for all the things Aunt Sis taught me, the greatest of which was a loud, distinct and undeniable call to companion the dying, I keep her ashes in my office and Paul looking down on me from my closet shelf. When I see them, I remember to honor my calling.