What I Learned Working With People Who Were Dying

What I Learned Working With People Who Were Dying

By Hasnain Shah

I didn’t expect the first lesson to be about shoes.

During my first week working in hospice care, I walked into Mr. Callahan’s room—an eighty-seven-year-old man with lungs that rattled like windowpanes in a storm—and the first thing he asked me wasn’t about his medication, his pain, or his breathing.

“Could you hand me my shoes?” he said.

His voice was soft and raspy, each word pulled up from somewhere deep. I looked over. His shoes were old leather slip-ons worn to the shape of his feet, sitting neatly beside his bed. His legs, thin as broom handles, trembled as he placed them on the floor.

“Are you sure you want to stand?” I asked gently.

He smiled, though it was more of a memory of a smile. “Son, I’ve been standing my whole life. I just… need to feel the ground again.”

I put the shoes on his feet, and he pressed his soles to the tile, closing his eyes with the reverence of someone touching holy soil.

That was the moment I learned the first rule of dying: Small things matter. More than anything.

A sip of cold water. A warm washcloth. Shoes on tired feet.

These small anchors tethered them to the life they still had, to the years that had once stretched ahead of them like a wide-open road.

The next lesson came from a woman named Helen, who insisted on sitting up every morning so she could “watch the day arrive.”

One morning, she asked me, “Do you know the trick to dying without fear?”

I shook my head, admittedly a little afraid of the answer.

She pointed to the window, where a pale sunrise bled into the sky like watercolor. “You learn to love the world without needing anything back from it.”

I didn’t know what she meant until after she passed, and I found a journal in her drawer—left open to a page titled Things I Will Miss That Never Belonged to Me.

On the list were things like:

the smell of rain hitting pavement

the sound of bus brakes

children yelling outside at recess

cinnamon rolls

the exact moment a bookstore doorbell rings

the rustle of grocery store bags

wind at the back of the neck

None of them were big, cinematic moments. They were the soundtracks to a life she had bothered to notice.

And I realized: Most of us don’t learn to love the world until we’re getting ready to leave it.

Another patient, a retired engineer named Peter, taught me the lesson I least expected: Dying people are still living, and they want to be treated that way.

One afternoon, I walked into his room to find him untangling the cords behind the TV, oxygen tubing snaked around his neck like a misplaced scarf.

“Peter, you can’t be bending down like that,” I said.

He waved me off. “If I die while fixing the cable, then that’s how I go. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to miss my baseball game.”

I laughed, but there was something fierce behind his laughter. Something human. Something alive.

Later that day, he told me, “Everyone treats you like you’re already dead. Or at least like you’re halfway there. But until I take my last breath, I want to be living, not observed.”

I carried that with me like a new spine.

But the lesson that changed me most came from a patient named Rosa.

She was quiet—so quiet it took me a whole week to hear her voice above the hum of the machines. She had days where she barely spoke, but she would always squeeze my hand when I entered the room.

One evening, I found her awake, staring at the ceiling.

“Do you need anything?” I asked.

She hesitated. Then, in a whisper, she said, “Can you sit with me? Just for a little.”

So I did.

We sat in silence, the kind that felt less like emptiness and more like a warm blanket settling around us. The sun dipped behind the blinds. She breathed shallowly, each inhale like a fragile promise.

After a while, she said, “People worry so much about saying the right thing to someone who’s dying. They think silence is cruel. But silence can be a kindness.”

Then her eyes filled—slowly, deliberately.

“Most of my life,” she said, “I talked to fill space. Toward the end… I realized space is allowed to be full on its own.”

She squeezed my hand again.

She passed two days later, just after sunset.

And I understood the final lesson: Presence is the greatest gift.

Not words. Not solutions.

Just being there.

Working with people who were dying taught me more about living than anything I’d ever done in my life.

They showed me that:

small moments matter more than grand ones

the world is beautiful in quiet, ordinary ways

living doesn’t end until the very last breath

silence is sacred

presence is love

And the thing I learned most of all?