As a new volunteer, meeting patients for the first time I'd wonder how I'd react to losing them. In time I learned to put aside expectations and just do the next thing to be done. Not only is this the best way to do the work, it's the best way to live. Centuries ago a teacher instructed his students with a famous dictum consisting of three words: "Only don't know." The bedside of the dying is a place where you only don't know over and over and over again.

Merrill Collett, At Home with Dying