That weird girl at the gym

I was in the gym yesterday, jogging on the treadmill and wondering when my body was going to relax so I could stop feeling like The Thing, who shakes the ground with every running stride. I was listening to my favorite music on my headphones, probably way too loud for my health, when I started crying. Right there in the aerobic room. Because it occurred to me that I could have played music for my mom as she lay dying in the early morning hours. I read that the last sense to leave is hearing. She loved music. I could have made her last hours a little easier. These are the kinds of thoughts that ambush me when I'm having an otherwise sensible day. I didn't stop running, because the sight of a woman in the gym, standing there on the treadmill crying, would be just way too weird. So I kept running and thinking. Few of us know anything about how to help someone who's dying. We just struggle to do the best we can. If we've called in Hospice, their volunteers seem to us to be pillars of knowledge. I wish I'd volunteered with Hospice while my mom was healthy, because I would have been a much better caregiver in later years if I had. But it never occurred to me to do that. Why would I want to be around dying people? Bad excuse: we are all people who are going to die. And Hospice trains its volunteers. I guess the point is that like Israeli citizens and the army, everyone should do a stint as a Hospice volunteer. Because then we'd be a better-armed nation of citizens.