The patient was restless . . . to the extreme.

An ambulance transported her to our hospice’s inpatient facility—a renovated suburban house in a neighborhood close to the main office—for pain management. The only local family for the dying eighty-something woman was a granddaughter, overwhelmed by raising her own kids while serving as her Gram’s sole caregiver. The patient’s siblings had already died. The patient’s daughter was, again, in rehab in Florida. Her son was an Army officer stationed in Germany, scrambling to organize a plane flight to be with his mother before she died.

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Right now, in the hospice home, in a room with a window overlooking the bougainvillea adorning a fence, the restless patient, a nurse, the doctor, and the chaplain were gathered. One bed was empty. But the second bed by the window, where the patient lay, shifted with her unsettled body, with her soft random moaning, with her eyes opening and closing.

The doctor had tried several medications that she thought might calm the patient. To a certain extent, the dosages worked. Her agitation had lessened. Barely.

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