"Although I struggle, like every other human being, with the daily challenges of overwork, impatience, fear, anger, and disappointment, I know that it is always my choice instead to choose happiness, forgiveness, compassion, and joy, to live each day as if it were my last, and to be grateful for every day that I have.

"Working with the dying has brought light into my own life, illuminating the shadowy corners of negativity that I alone have the choice to relinquish or to transform to something more positive. Even though the work I do is with the dying, it has also been work within myself, and I thank God every day for both of those opportunities.

"So, in the end, what is it that the dying teach others around them? They teach how to love and how to allow ourselves to be loved; how to forgive and how to ask for forgiveness; how to find our joy and how to spread that joy around to others. They also teach us how to spend valuable time connecting our earthly self with our spiritual self so that these two separate but vital aspects of our being aren't strangers when they meet as the time of our own death draws near.

"And so it is perhaps meant to be that, with every person's dying, another person is learning to live well.

"Although I can't know for certain, I suspect from what I have witnessed that, possibly, the very best part of living might actually be the dying."