When people heard that her parents met in a hospital, they assumed her mom was a nurse and her dad a surgeon, but they were always wrong – both were surgeons. She always thought she would be a good surgeon because she liked science, and math wasn’t her worst subject. She wasn’t squeamish around blood, and the idea of devoting her career to helping others on a microscopic level that came down to their internal anatomy appealed to Sadie because it meant that what she was doing was meaningful.

Her parents thought Sadie shouldn’t work in a hospital because she didn’t have much emotional bandwidth. Sadie grew up crying a lot. Little kids cry a lot, but Sadie cried more than a lot. When the neighbor’s dog died, she cried, even though it wasn’t her dog. Actually, she was very allergic to dogs. In 5th grade, her teacher showed the class a documentary about beavers. In the documentary, a beaver was carried away from his dam in a storm. Sadie unabashedly cried even though she was in 5th grade and crying in class was considered embarrassing now. The other kids sitting near Sadie were even embarrassed for her, glancing at each other uncomfortably while Sadie sniveled. By the end, the beaver had found his way home, and once again, Sadie released a fresh set of tears.

Sadie cried on every first and last day of school. She cried in the car rides home after her elementary and middle school graduation. For her high school graduation, she waited until the night was over. When she was finally alone in her room, she wept into her pillow, realizing that she had been holding her breath the entire time. Even in college, Sadie had struggled to hold herself together. One time, she had an Uber driver who was an awful driver. But he was an old man, who didn’t seem to hear anything she said, no matter how loudly she repeated herself. She tipped him, and when doing so, she felt sad because she knew many people probably didn’t. The old man drove off towards his next pick-up, leaving Sadie misty-eyed on the quiet street. 

Eventually, Sadie’s parents came around to the idea of her becoming a doctor. They thought her tendency to cry was because she cared deeply about life. This, they believed, would make her a great doctor, as she would be dedicated to saving lives. She never quite found the words to explain it, but her tears didn’t come from a place of empathy—rather, they reflected something missing inside her. Maybe resilience, strength even. Sadie’s parents never did get to see her become the doctor she dreamt of being when she was younger. When she graduated college, she started a job as a nurse in a hospice – not long after her parents death.

When she first got the call that her parents were in an accident, Sadie cried. When she got to the hospital and wasn’t allowed to see them, she sobbed. When the doctor told her they were gone, she wailed. 

Her uncle arranged the open casket funeral, and how he came to that decision she didn’t know. When she first heard the idea, she didn’t have many thoughts about it, but during those weeks, Sadie didn’t have many thoughts about anything. She doesn’t remember the casket itself but can’t forget the inside of it. While her parents lay with their eyes shut, Sadie couldn’t stop looking at them. After the funeral, she visited her parents’ home to help her uncle put it up for sale. When she stepped into the house, she avoided the floorboards that she knew creaked from her childhood, almost like muscle memory. Her room was mostly empty because she had taken most of the stuff she owned in high school to college. The walls were decorated with family photos and cheap prints that her mom had collected over the years. The home she grew up in felt haunted, and she felt sorry for the next family that would live there.

For the first few weeks, her friends would text, and call, but it was mainly called after she stopped responding to their texts. Initially, she would respond, promising them she was okay. And like gravity, they would fall back to her, calling again to ensure she was truly okay. Eventually, she would just let the phone ring until it ended itself instead of answering because she couldn’t help but cry after each call. 

When she started working at the hospice a couple of months after the funeral, Sadie thought she had lost all of her senses in more ways than one. 

How could she have spent her whole life being so emotional about sad things, and now, after being faced with one of the saddest things imaginable, she chooses to spend her time in a place that constantly reminds her of it? She did it partly because she wasn’t ready to go to medical school after her parents died. Another reason was that it was one of the few job openings that she was qualified for, at least on paper. And she really needed a job. 

She hated the hospice at first. The mornings before work, she would cry before leaving the house. She always felt nervous because each day she would talk to her patients knowing they would soon no longer be able to speak back. If the morning traffic was worse than usual, she would cry again because, despite not wanting to be there, she couldn’t be late for work. She would also cry whenever new patients were checked into the hospice. The same thing happened to patients who left.

On her first day after completing orientation, which was her fourth day of working in the hospice, Sadie went to a room to bring a patient medication for treating nausea. The patient rested, propped up by several stacked pillows. His chest was rising, slowly, and breathe was soft. She tried to nudge him awake, so he could take his medication, but after two nudges, his chest stopped moving. 

Sadie wasn’t sure if she wanted to cry, puke, or both, but she also wasn’t sure of what had happened. For a few seconds, she stood frozen beside his still body. Before she could do anything, the patient opened his eyes and started to laugh at Sadie. Horrified, she was tempted to take the patient’s nausea medication herself. Sadie later found out that this patient, who was nearing the end of his 80s and had no family, had been playing this trick on staff since  he came to the hospice. 

Not only was she shocked by this patient’s behavior, but also how the other hospice workers could bear this job; most of her co-workers had been at the hospice much longer than she had and yet they hadn’t quit. They weren’t nearly as emotional as Sadie was about working at the hospice. If they were, she couldn’t tell. But they probably weren’t.

Sadie assumed the other hospice workers had never experienced personal loss themselves, so they couldn’t understand how devastating a hospice is. Part of Sadie knew this thought was wrong, though: it’s hard not to feel some kind of connection to patients in a hospice. Another reason for this could be that the other workers might be desensitized to the atmosphere of the hospice. This explanation provided her even less comfort because Sadie had been sensitive to everything her entire life.

What ultimately became the answer to Sadie was time. After a few months had passed working at the hospice, she cried less and less each morning before work. She started showing up to work without red, puffy eyes. She began to feel less nauseous around the patient who liked to play dead. She even started to like spending time with that patient because she thought his humor had a strange lightness to it. Over time, she would come home, turn off the lights, and sleep with ease knowing that she would soon repeat the day. Though she didn’t enjoy being around death, eventually she came to a point where she wasn’t saddened or disturbed by it either. If anything, she came to understand death. It was inevitable, for everyone, and if she could do something that helped people come to terms with this inevitable act like she has, Sadie has found herself doing something worthwhile. 

She thought about her parents’ open-casket funeral a lot. In the hospice, sometimes bodies go limp while their eyes remain open. After witnessing so many moments of sight falling into blindness, Sadie became grateful that her uncle arranged an open-casket funeral where she saw her parents resting with shut eyes. Sadie would never get over her parents’ passing, but at least she can think about them without crying. They would never believe the girl who used to always cry found solace, at some capacity, where people go to die. Now, she wonders if the hospice is where she will end up closing her eyes for a final sleep and what she might see if they ever open again.