Trying to sleep at the end of a Hospice bed is kind of interesting. At least with this bed that they brought into my mother’s house, they install an articulated blue air mattress and then hang its pump on the end of the bed. Her comfy recliner ended up at the foot of that bed.

      As pumps go, it’s fairly quiet, but in the dark corners of the night you can definitely hear it. The perpetual drone of the pump can serve as white noise, a constant hum that nullifies the creaks and the cracks of the home settling for the night (and maybe some lingering conversations in your head).  But the mattress itself makes its own sounds as it pumps up or releases air, that brilliant breathing-like design of this hospital bed.

      If you’re sleeping at the end of the bed, it means that they didn’t bring the bed for you, and you are probably there because you love the person who is in it. For me, that would be my mother. My mother has moved with the ebb and flow of this mattress for three weeks now, three weeks longer than any expert (or amateur) ever thought.

       Somewhere near that end of the hospice bed your prayers change. You stop praying for that person, whom you love dearly, to get better, and you start praying that the Lord would let them go. In my mother’s case, that’s all she wants. All she wants is to go be with her Savior, a God that she has served all her life, a Lord that she firmly believes in with every now small inch of her being.

       At the end of the hospice bed, now with the sun shining through the living room window, conversations happen. Family gathers. Stories are told. Family stories are clarified and refined. Past blessings and hurts and questions get rehearsed and, again, clarified and sometimes healed. Forgiveness and perspective are given and received at the end of the hospice bed.

      There’s nothing decorous about the end of the bed. It’s not a desirable piece of furniture. But I’m glad it’s here, and that I am here. The comfy recliner next to the droning pump has been a place of conversation, but also of observation of my Mom. There I have sat and looked way beyond the now glassy eyes on my mother’s face, and into the collective memories of a mother and her son.  Like the rituals of having dinner every night with my Dad, but then just her and me doing the dishes. Every night, all week, every month for all the years that I could reach up to get dishes out of the stainer to dry, we talked and processed and bonded. I can’t say that I miss doing the dishes, but I now will forever miss those conversations that wiped clean more than dishes.

       It was at the end of the bed that I stood and prayed and said goodbye for the last time. There were tears, the tears of two brothers now hugging each other for consolation instead of her, and it was at that moment, when my brother leaned over to kiss her, that she produced the final liquid her body had, a small tear in her right eye. For all the sedation and the decline of all her abilities, her last gesture, without being able to talk or to move or even see, was to share a tear. One tear that became a torrent for me, tears of grief, but now that she’s finally let go, of gratitude. I am eternally grateful for that little girl from Altoona, PA who became a wife, then a missionary, then my Mom. She ended well. I will strive to do the same.

Carol Emily Nelson October 13, 1938 – April 25, 2026