Guests filled the lobby as I walked through the front entrance, and the first thing I saw was the long table by the fireplace, and on it, stacked in two towers, sixty-three spiral guest books.
I hadn’t seen most of those in thirty years. When one filled up I put it in the storage room off the chapel and started another, and I honestly could not have told you if anybody had ever kept them.
The development director had. Every one. Somebody had gone in there with a hand truck.
Here’s what a hospice guest book is. It sits inside the front door and families sign it when they come, and that’s the whole intended purpose. What actually happens is that people write in it on their way out at three in the morning, when there is no one left to say anything to and they cannot go home yet.
Thirty-one years of that.
They had gone through the whole stack and flagged the pages. There were a lot of flags.
They’d typed some of them up and read them out that night. Most were two lines. A man in 1997 who wrote that somebody had brought him a blanket and never asked him a single question. A woman in 2013 who wrote that she came back at Christmas and the coffee was fresh at two in the morning like it always was and she doesn’t know why that undid her.
The one the director read last was from 2004, in careful cursive, from a woman whose husband died on a Sunday:
“I have been in six hospitals this year and one of them lost his chart twice. In this building a woman at a desk knew both our names before I had my coat off. Write that down somewhere it counts.”
Somebody did write it down. That’s the part that got me.
In the development office there is a file of donor designations — the little line on a memorial gift where a family writes who it’s in honor of. They pulled thirty-one years of those too. Four hundred and some gifts, going back to 1996, made in honor of the front desk, or the lady at the door, or the woman who makes the coffee, and a good number of them just with my first name and no last name, because plenty of those families never knew it.
Nobody in that building had ever added them up. Nobody had a reason to.
They’re naming the lobby. I said no twice and was overruled by people who do not work for me.
The director stood up and apologized in front of about two hundred donors and volunteers, and she did not soften it, and I will say she is a decent woman who arrived and started sorting a building before she’d sat in it after midnight.
She sat with a family last month. Two in the morning, no coffee made yet. She made it.
Anyone can greet visitors. That’s true. It just turns out somebody has to actually do it, and then keep doing it for thirty-one years.