Whatever Held

I took a break from hospice volunteer work for a while. But I always come back to thoughts about my very first assignment, a man I ended up calling Elvis, though that was nowhere near his real name. He was born in China, moved to Brazil as a young man, and came to America once his kids were college-aged.

By the time I met him, he was dying, and he barely spoke English. What he did speak was some mix of Mandarin and Portuguese, often both in the same sentence, switching mid-thought like it was the most natural thing in the world. I remember being a little panicked at first — I don’t speak either language, and here was a man near the end of his life needing something from me, and neither of us had a shared language to make that easy.
His last wish was to learn to write English. Just that. Not to see anyone in particular, not to finish anything unfinished — he wanted to learn to write a language he’d barely spoken, at the very end of his life, mostly for the sake of learning it.

Somehow, between his fragments of two other languages and my complete lack of either, he learned. I don’t fully understand how we managed it. But we did, a little at a time, and along the way I
learned something from him too — something about gratitude that I don’t think I could have learned from anyone who’d had an easier life.
He was dying, and he was still grateful. Grateful for a long life. Grateful to still be learning something new this late into it. Every single time I left his apartment, he’d say it — thank you, thank you very much — which is exactly why I started calling him Elvis, half joke, half genuine affection.

One day I was walking out of his little apartment, done for the day, already a few steps down the hallway. He wasn’t supposed to go outside his apartment at all, but apparently the pen situation was urgent enough to override that. I heard him behind me before I saw him — calling out “teacher, teacher” in that same hard-won English, holding the pen out
like I’d left something behind. I had to stop and tell him — it’s your pen, you can keep it. He’d broken his own rule, chased me down a hallway he wasn’t supposed to be in, worried he’d taken something that wasn’t his, when really it had already been given to him.

I think about him more than I expected to, all these years later. A man who crossed three countries and two languages, who spent his last months learning to write a third, not because he needed to but because he still wanted to. Who thanked me every single time I left, like it wasn’t his due but a gift. Who ran down a hallway he wasn’t allowed to be in, just to make sure I didn’t leave without something that was already his to keep. We were about as unlikely a pair as you could design on purpose — a hospice worker from California and a dying man who’d lived in China, then Brazil, then here, fluent in pieces of two languages that weren’t mine, learning a third that wasn’t fully his either. None of that mattered in the end. Not the borders he’d crossed, not the languages we didn’t share, not where either of us had started out. What we had instead was a pen, a hallway, and more gratitude passing between two strangers than I’ve felt from people who’ve known me my whole life.

He wasn’t born here, and he loved this country more openly than plenty of people who were born into it and never had to think about it twice. That’s stuck with me since. There are extraordinary people from every country, every background, every story — and I’ve come to believe there are shithole people scattered everywhere too, born anywhere, entitled to nothing more than anyone else just because of where they happened to land. It was never about the country stamped on anyone’s passport. It was always just about who they turned out to be once they got wherever they were going. I hope, wherever he is now, someone is still calling him Elvis, and he’s still saying thank you, thank you very much, to whoever’s kind enough to be standing near him.