Transcriber: Oksana Rotko Reviewer: Cristina Bufi-Pöcksteiner
My name's Will DeBruin, and I'm a hospice volunteer.
I provide companionship for terminally ill patients
with less than six months to live.
One of my favourite quotes comes from the novel "The Great Gatsby":
"I was both within and without,
enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life."
This quote perfectly describes what it's like to be a hospice volunteer.
You're intimately drawn into a very personal situation,
but you're still an outsider
because you can never truly understand what a dying person is going through.
In addition, because death is a very personal transition,
there's an inexhaustible variety in death
because each death is as varied as the human race is.
Because of this, each patient has taught me something different
and influenced my life in a different way.
Time is a relative thing.
It can fly by when you're having fun
with your friends,
or it can seem to drag on forever.
For example, when I was a kid,
I remember going to bed on Christmas Eve night,
and then I would never sleep that night.
That night would drag on forever and ever
because I couldn't wait to open up my gifts the next morning.
One thing I've noticed is time seems to go quicker when you get older.
One of the most impactful conversations I ever had with a patient
was about this phenomenon.
This patient, they were not necessarily putting together comprehensible thoughts
every single day.
That's fairly common at the end of a life
because, you know,
whether it's due to the disease process or various medications they're on,
they're often, you know, a little, sort of, but.
We were sitting there,
and we were just watching the world go by outside the window.
And the patient turned to me,
and I could tell through their gestures
that they had something very important to say.
"Time goes quicker when you get older."
I replied, "I understand that.
I'm just finishing up my freshman year of college,
and it flew by.
It feels like I just moved in yesterday."
Time going quicker is a merciful thing.
It means the suffering goes quicker too.
The patient then turned to me with tears in their eyes and said,
"Don't get old."
We wept together.
Unconcerned, time moved on:
slowly for one of us,
too quickly for the other.
In a different place and a different time,
I visited another patient who had a neurodegenerative disorder
that left them paralyzed from the neck down.
You know that a lot of diseases can cause that,
but they all have one thing in common,
and that's the need for complete dependence on others
for the patient's care.
And patients really seem to not like that, but -
So, this patient and I, we had a connection.
We talked a lot, and we got pretty close.
Usually you can tell when a patient's going to die
because they stop eating, they stop drinking,
they sleep a lot more,
they start to fade away.
But this death caught me by surprise,
and I will never forget the day after I found out about the death.
I had to get up at 5:30 AM. My alarm was blaring.
I'm a collegiate athlete;
we have workouts in the morning,
and these workouts, they are not fun at all.
It's in a dead of winter, too, out on the field,
and you'll go from like sweating and running,
and then you'll stop - your hair will freeze.
I couldn't run my hand through my hair.
It was bad.
This morning was different.
I was thankful.
I was thankful that I could feel the cold winter air in my nose
and burning in my lungs.
I was thankful that I can move my legs and feel the pain
because that pain meant I was alive.
I am young, my heart is beating, and I'm alive.
These small blessings, often overlooked, really do mean the most.
However, just because we appreciate the small blessings in life
doesn't mean that the big victories are any less sweet.
I'll never forget -
we beat my high school rivals in a JV football game
by a last-second field goal,
and my coach said something very impactful after.
He said,
"There's nothing quite like winning a high school football game.
When you get old, you experience this feeling less often.
It fades away, so appreciate it while you have it.
You'll experience it, maybe, when you propose to the woman you love,
you'll experience it
when you hold your child in your arms for the first time,
but you never experience it as often.
When you get old in life, things get taken from you.
You lose friendships, you lose relationships,
but you move on and you grow as a person.
But this moment, this moment is forever.
So I want you to take your teammates' hand in yours,
look them in the eye and put them in your heart forever
because forever just happened."
Over the summer, I volunteered at a in-patient care facility,
serving breakfast to patients once a week.
I would always have time,
I'd always make a point to talk to each patient and get to know them,
but it was hard
because each week when I came back, a different room was empty,
another relationship was severed.
These empty rooms really came to symbolize what death meant to me.
It was cold, it was final, it was clinical.
However, reflecting on my experiences and thinking about what my coach said,
these patients and their impact on me,
despite the fact that they were dead,
it still mattered, it still lasted.
In a way, they were immortal
because they were in my heart forever
and in the hearts of their family members.
So, I encourage you,
love as deeply and as often as you can,
take every moment and appreciate it because each moment is a blessing.
And never fail to make a positive impact on somebody's life
if you are given the opportunity.
Thank you.
(Applause)