And so began another evening in the Blue Room.

I first met the quiet and tender Eleanor (name changed for privacy) in the fall of 2017, some 10 months before that fateful evening. I was a recent college graduate, returning to my California hometown for a period before medical school. Eleanor was a stout, gentle, 85-year-old woman from Somewhere, Vermont, keen at pointing out the bags beneath my eyes.

The two of us were quite the pairing. During my weekend visits, I would often bring Eleanor lunch (a burrito and some falafel, not from the same place) while she would recount old adventures in New England forests—painting pictures of the snow, the spring, summer, and fall alike. I was an all-too-ready listener. We were, in her words, a match made in heaven.

Yet so often during our time together—which still continues to this day—the Blue Room in which Eleanor lived seemed rather the opposite of a joyous realm. When we first met, over 12 months ago, Eleanor had recently entered hospice care. She had no malignancies or imminent dangers, but a complex spattering of physiological failures—and me, her hospice volunteer. Medical illness was not, however, her greatest trial. Eleanor's deepest hurt—perhaps her sense of existential failure—was far more malignant: she was confused by, isolated from, and alien to the world around her.

All of this was embodied by the Blue Room. Eleanor lived on the third floor of a skilled nursing facility, and her spacious “apartment” had a functioning kitchen and big windows, but its walls were a wilted steel-blue and the blinds unceasingly shut. The room was always dark, even during Saturday afternoon visits with falafel. Eleanor was equally darkened: feeling that her body had given up on itself, and in turn, that the world had given up on her. Her family was busy; company was sparse; and a kind, well-trained staff could do little to alleviate her loneliness. Eleanor was so accommodating, so exceedingly humble, that she rarely articulated any of this. Her humility was instead compounded by shyness, and her shyness by the Blue Room, which was rarely entered by anyone, besides her nurses and me.

As this loneliness persisted—and as illness kept her bedridden, couch-ridden, rid of anything without a seat—Eleanor's physical and mental life eroded. Without work, activities, or much of any daily duty, she began to forget names and dates. (To this day, she believes my name is “Anthony.”) Devoid of mental exercise, resigned to the company of television, she slowed markedly. Her mind would often wander throughout conversation; her words seemed detached and out of place.

In the early months of my caregiving, I often entered that Blue Room—pitch-black but for the television's glow—and endeavored to ease Eleanor's despair. I would talk, touch, listen, look, in desperate attempt to give this woman a meaningful life. But there was a problem with my naïve toiling: no matter how eloquent, logical, or compassionate, my words alone could not effect such a change. Not because I lacked Eleanor's trust—I quickly became the woman's “best friend,” in her words—but because bare words would never do.

Eleanor was, and still is, reliably conversive. Yet after 10 months as her hospice volunteer, I finally realized that no matter how well she kept up with my words, my meaning had dropped away like bricks falling off a conveyor belt. My ramblings about abstract ideas—meaning, purpose, the value of a life—might as well have been flung from the windows of the Blue Room. None of these observations were unique for an older woman with a litany of complex illnesses; but still, I was perplexed.

I found a key to my confusion, and a singular joy, in the quick eyes of Eleanor herself. As I walked into her room one Friday evening some weeks ago, placing a book inside my backpack as I entered, she asked what I was holding. I set the backpack down, pulled up a chair, and revealed the object of her gaze. “It's a book of poems,” I said, handing her a collection of Walt Whitman's writings, gifted by a friend of mine. “Would you like me to read it to you?”

She assented with ambivalent eyes. I opened to the page where I had last left off, in the classic “Song of Myself”—and so began another evening in the Blue Room.

“To behold the day-break!” I read aloud, hardly knowing if she was following along, “The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows/The air tastes good to my palate” (Whitman, Reference Whitman2010; 24.54–56).

Indeed, as soon as the daybreak was beheld, there was a sudden change in Eleanor. A loose and slow-moving soul, hardly stiffened by any worldly force, she now sharpened and straightened upon the bed. It was as if she were a stranger in a foreign country, hearing her native tongue for the first time in years. It was as if Whitman, or some power of poetry, was speaking to Eleanor in her own language: “I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera/Ah this indeed is music—this suits me” (Whitman, Reference Whitman2010; 26.18–19).

Up until this point, I had tried to understand Eleanor through logic and abstractions—“What gives you meaning? How can we find that meaning?”—thinking these were the essence of a human life. Eloquently, wisely, logically, I wanted to walk Eleanor through the labyrinth of her troubles. But the truth was far simpler: with death not far off, Eleanor needed life at its nearest. And so I read, and continued reading, and to this day read poetry to the woman in the Blue Room.

Great poetry is, in fact, the precise opposite of detached abstraction. Great poems might seem muddled with uncertainty, but if they are muddy, it is because life is never neat. The imagery, the rhythm, the metaphor of poems all harken back to the imagery, the rhythm, the metaphor of human life. For patients and caregivers wrestling with terminal illness, poetry can be the most intelligible of languages. As life nears its end, the grand chorus may sing breath into even the most tired lungs.

Perhaps, then, the Blue Room was not merely a metaphor for Eleanor's melancholia. Perhaps our “match made in Heaven” had—in one another, and in poetry—found a rightness and comfort elusive in worldly words.

Weeks later, as our poetic tradition continued on another Friday evening, Eleanor interrupted my reading: “You're the reason I'm alive today,” she smiled with a humble confidence, “you really are.” There was wonder again, she said—and beauty to the world. Her blinds were open; life was real; and I received all the appreciation and gratitude of a life-saving transplant surgeon. But alas, I knew she was mistaken. Eleanor had been on hospice for more than a year—and now seemed in better health!—but I was not to thank. The vividness of life, the wonder of imagery, the joy of beauty: I had provided none of these to Eleanor. But poetry had.

In her Blue Room, in her isolating loneliness, Eleanor's entire life yearned for personal expression. In those early months of our time together, when I would walk into the room and search for logical answers to her existential problems, I never did find what I was looking for. But how could I? How could I reduce the complexities, the paradoxes of life, into neat little packages of prose and discourse? In Eleanor's state of mind and body, abstract philosophical concepts were much less tangible than the ghosts of her New England forests.

Eleanor could, and did, understand imagery and the viscera of life. And so, when I first read Whitman aloud in that dim Blue Room, Eleanor was indeed hearing the Song of Herself: a song sung in the language of rhythm, of concrete metaphor—the language of poetry. The song melted her alienation, her isolation, in the warming heat of the human spirit. The sick woman felt alive again, seeing places and people wonderful and unknown; her New England winter turning softly to spring.

I could not explain then, and cannot now, the powers of these words and this song of existence. But to be inexplicable seems perfectly fine for Eleanor—who, to this day, needs no explanation of her literary lifeline. She needs only to hear, to listen, and she sees life and its meaning all afresh.