When people sit with a dying person, they know that they are doing more than taking up space in the room. But if you ask to describe what that "more" is, they have a hard time finding the right words. And when the words come, they are almost always some variant on, "I was simply being present."

We learn to "practice presence" when we sit with a dying person — to treat the space between us as sacred, to honor the soul and its destiny. Our honoring may be wordless or perhaps mediated by speech that the dying person cannot hear. Yet this honoring keeps us somehow connected as we bear witness to another's journey into the ultimate solitude.

Parker J. Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness