First it was Gertie. After that followed Katherine. Then May who grimaced at me from the second I pulled out my copy of Alice Munro (and who eventually requested my transfer, one week before she passed away). Jean who liked to read Nicholas Sparks, Lucille who I never got to meet. And then there was Ruth.

I started volunteering in a hospice the summer of my freshman year. I needed something to do that wasn’t centered around schoolwork or The Michigan Daily, and I always had an affinity for old people.

These are the questions I usually get when I tell someone where I go every Friday: Why do you do that? How can you stand to be around all those dying people? Or, in a rare moment, “God bless you.” Well, God needn’t bless me, because I certainly didn’t come into the position with some high-minded mission. I’ve never had anybody close to me die, and I haven’t the slightest idea on how to alleviate the suffering of mankind. My aim was simple: I just wanted to make a friend.

I was nervous when meeting my first patient, a boisterous 82-year-old woman with dementia, disorientation and an oxygen tube affixed to her nose.

“I’m here to visit Gertrude,” I announced to nobody in particular. “Oh, Gertie,” one of the nurses smirked at me, pointing to the kitchen door. “Good luck with that.”

I saw the bright red throw blanket before I could see her face. When I got closer, I could feel her eyes on me, suspicious, but not unfriendly. Then, before I could introduce myself to her, she cut me off. “Where’s my cookie?” she demanded.

It takes a long time for a person to admit that he or she is terminally ill. Statistics say that patients die within six months after being admitted to hospice care. At the nursing homes that I frequent, most patients pass within two. One of my greatest fears when I first started volunteering was that I would get a lot of heavy questions about God and morality. But most patients I’ve talked to are very frank about their situations — they’re prepared for death to come at any moment and are not afraid for it to happen. Somewhere along the way, they’ve already figured it out.

That day, I spent nearly five hours with Gertie. I barely even remember what we talked about — desserts, the sexiness of Christopher Plummer, how much we hate music — the kinds of random conversations you have with your friends late on a Thursday night. She had to go to the bathroom in the middle of my visit — which she did in front of my face, as I watched two nurses flip her on her side and wipe the mess away with paper towels as soon as it came out. “Jennifer, do you like the movie?” she cracked.

Later, after I tucked her into bed, I realized that I had no idea why I was so scared to see Gertie in the first place. Lying there underneath the white-frosted covers, she looked so small and vulnerable.

“I feel like I’ve known you forever,” she said to me in a brief moment of seriousness. That was the last time I ever saw her.

I think the biggest shock to me when I started volunteering was that my patients actually died. I know, that should be obvious. What do you expect if you work in a hospice, right? In movies, the patients look sickly and weak about three months before the event actually happens. My mind flashes back to Melanie Wilkes’s death speech in “Gone With the Wind.” She takes like 45 minutes to talk to each and every one of her friends before she passes away. But real deaths sneak up on you so quietly, so suddenly, that it doesn’t seem possible. In one moment, Gertie was an exuberant force of nature, making jokes about pooping, screaming at nurses to find her cookie. In the next, she wasn’t.

“They’re trying to get rid of me, but I’m still hanging on,” my current patient, Ruth, likes to tell me. Ruth has a pretty severe form of dementia, and on most visits she can’t recognize me from the week before. But we’ve gradually fallen into a routine: I introduce myself. I compliment her on her hair (which she gets done at the salon every Thursday at 2 p.m.). We talk about poetry.

There are days where I come in and she is so full of pain that it hurts her to even speak. During these times, I pull out my copy of William Wordsworth and read to her selections from her favorite poems. It seems to calm her down. But sometimes, she can’t even bear to listen.

Geriatrics presents a different scenario than conventional medicine. Usually, a person who comes to the hospital is suffering from an “illness,” which the doctor can deal with by funneling these symptoms into a “disease” and treating that disease with a “cure.” The heart of geriatric care is about follow-up. Palliative care is fashioned not in order to treat symptoms, but to look at the big picture: morphine drips, psychological and spiritual treatment, pain management, anything that makes their lives a little easier. If a 20-year-old is sick, that illness is treated as an abnormality, a battle to be vanquished.