My husband is a hospice chaplain in the small, rural area where we live.  He is someone who ought to be in the position he’s in, because he somehow manages to come home every day with a smile on his face, as if he is a soul of such age that he understands what is “transpiring beyond that which is occurring,” as my beloved Pir Vilayat would have said.  He told me the following story today:

Today, while I was driving our Hospice Medical Director around for the clinical “face-to-face” evaluations required by Medicare to recertify patients for Hospice care, one of the husbands of an Alzheimer’s patient, who is himself age 94 and still active, said to the doctor, “You don’t remember World War II, because you’re too young, but after we liberated the death camps, I operated a bulldozer at one of them to knock things down and move some earth around.  There were people who looked like that,” pointing to his wife’s naturally emaciated and gaunt form, “because the Nazis starved them.  I was told to dig a big hole for a grave, and they brought those bodies there.  They had somebody pray over them and I’d cover them up.  I never thought I’d have that in my family.”