There's a before and after. Before, I believed fear was a problem to solve. I’d sit with families in hospice rooms, my hands clasped tight, ready with scripture or platitudes to banish the tremor in their voices. "It’s going to be okay," I’d say, meaning it, though I knew the words were hollow. I thought my job was to make the fear disappear, to be the calm in the storm. I was wrong.
The turning point wasn’t dramatic. It was Mrs. G, 82, in her small sunroom, the scent of lavender from her garden drifting through the open window. She’d been quiet for hours, her breathing shallow. I sat beside her, not speaking, just holding space. Then, her eyes opened, glassy but clear. "I’m still scared," she whispered, her voice thin as tissue paper. "Not for me. For the boys. For the quiet after." She didn’t ask me to fix it. She just named it. And in that naming, the fear didn’t vanish. It just… existed. Alongside the lavender. Alongside the quiet.
I didn’t say a word. I just reached out, gently, and held her hand. Her fingers were cold, trembling. I didn’t offer hope. I didn’t promise it would get easier. I just sat with her in the fear. And in that stillness, something shifted inside me. Fear wasn’t a monster to defeat. It was a current I could learn to swim in, not against. It didn’t need to be erased to be lived with.
After that, I stopped rushing to the light. I stopped believing I had to make the hard thing not hard. I learned to sit with the tremor in the voice, the unspoken "what if," the raw ache of a life ending. I stopped trying to fix the fear and started listening to it. It’s okay to not be okay. What if we just… sat with that for a moment? Let the fear be there, and the love too? Let the fear be part of the ordinary, sacred rhythm of being human?
Now, when I walk my rescue dogs through the Vermont woods at dusk, I feel the old fear—of loss, of the unknown—sometimes rise like fog. But I don’t push it away. I breathe with it. I remember Mrs. G’s hand in mine, cold and trembling, and the quiet grace of simply being with it. The fear doesn’t vanish. But it no longer owns me. It’s just a part of the path, like the path itself.
— Kyle Smith, sitting with what's hard