CJ chooses to volunteer at the hospice

CJ chooses to volunteer at the hospice as a counselor, turning her experience of illness and family caregiving into practical support for guests and those close to them. The choice begins as a request to Fran, but becomes sustained work: CJ visits people in their rooms, speaks with them, and offers comfort to families. Her role also gives the story a quiet reversal. The woman who arrives to help others through suffering eventually faces her own death and asks Toby to stay beside her.

The proposal and its grounds

CJ raises the idea during lunch in the courtyard with Fran, after the two have become friends and often eat together. Toby lies at their feet, alert to the small rituals of the scene: he watches for crumbs, while CJ’s laughter brings a brief easing of the pain he senses in her. When CJ says she has a question for Fran but wants her to think before answering, Fran jokes that the preamble resembles what her husband said when he proposed. CJ clarifies that this is not that kind of proposal: she wants to work at the hospice in counseling and volunteer because she sees how hard it is for Fran, Patsy, and Mona to keep up.

The request follows a change in CJ’s working life. She says she has been winding down her practice for a long time and now works only as a consultant. She also finds it increasingly difficult to relate to teenagers. When she tells them she understands what they are going through, she sees skepticism; from their perspective, someone in her seventies seems scarcely different from someone a hundred years old. Her offer is therefore not simply an effort to fill spare time. CJ identifies a kind of work she believes she can still do, while acknowledging that her previous professional role no longer connects with its intended audience as it once did.

Experience, family, and the request for an exception

CJ grounds her proposal in two kinds of firsthand knowledge. She tells Fran that she knows what it is like to lie in bed feeling horrible, an experience she has three times a week. She also points to what she is going through with Gloria as a source of insight into how families feel. The conversation thus joins bodily vulnerability to caregiving: CJ understands suffering not only as the person experiencing it, but through the strain and uncertainty surrounding a family member.

Fran explains the obstacle directly. The hospice normally discourages family members from forming volunteer relationships with the hospice until a year after their guest has died. CJ already knows the policy, and says that is why she wants Fran to think about whether an exception could be made for her. Fran calls CJ a good daughter, though CJ doubts Gloria would agree, or would ever have agreed. The exchange leaves the emotional difficulty unresolved; it does not turn their complicated mother-daughter relationship into uncomplicated praise. Instead, CJ makes her case from the circumstances she has actually lived through.

Fran agrees to discuss the request with the director and the nuns, while stressing that the decision belongs to them, not to the employees. The hospice’s waiting period therefore remains a real institutional boundary, rather than a rule Fran can waive on her own. About a week later, Gloria dies while CJ is at her bedside. The timing places CJ’s wish to serve the hospice alongside the loss that gave her particular insight into families’ experiences, without suggesting that her request itself caused or hastened that loss.

Returning to the hospice and doing the work

After a period of waiting, CJ returns on a windy autumn day. Toby initially hesitates because her walk has an unusual hitch and a limp, and her bulky coat conceals how frail she has become. Then her familiar scent reaches him, and he hurries to her, careful not to jump up and knock her over. Fran embraces CJ; CJ sets some things down in one of the rooms. Their routine changes: instead of leaving in the morning and coming back at night, CJ now leaves at night and returns in the morning. She continues to go regularly to a room with couches, though she does not take Toby there.

At the hospice, CJ moves through the building to visit guests, talk with them, and sometimes hug them. Toby stays at her heels. He notices that people are often in pain while they speak with her, whether they are lying in bed or standing beside it, and that after a quiet conversation their pain often lessens a little. Family members reach for Toby too, and CJ’s work takes place alongside his: she offers conversation, while he allows people to hold him for as long and as tightly as they need. Fran and Patsy are sometimes present in the rooms, and they join CJ in calling him a good dog. The recurring praise marks a shared practice of care rather than a task belonging to CJ alone.

Care returned

CJ’s hospice work gives her a place among people facing illness and loss, but it does not make her own suffering disappear. Toby senses sharp pains in her when she moves or sits down; laughter can make those pains seem to retreat. Later, while feeding him pieces of a ham-and-cheese sandwich Eddie has brought her, CJ tells Toby she will be leaving. She says she has had the good things life can offer and is weary of the bad, especially what may come if she tries to prolong her life. She regrets leaving her friends, naming Toby as one of them, but trusts that he is loved and cared for. She asks him to be with her at the end so she will not be afraid.

Fran sits with CJ on a clear spring afternoon. Toby lies with his head on CJ’s chest as her hand strokes his fur; when the hand stops, Fran moves her chair closer and takes it. CJ dies with Toby beside her and Fran holding her hand. The scene completes the movement implicit in her volunteer choice: having offered presence to people in pain and to their families, CJ receives that same kind of presence from friends in her final hours. Her work at the hospice is presented through specific acts—visiting, listening, embracing, and staying—rather than through a formal account of counseling. Its meaning rests in that reciprocal attention, and in the return of care when CJ herself can no longer offer it.