Let me be perfectly honest regarding Charles Rose's memoir, In the Midst of Life: A Hospice Volunteer’s Story  (an account of his two-year experience as a hospice volunteer). . . it is not the type of book I would ever in my wildest dreams want to read and most certainly would have avoided it to the millionth degree.  It is everything I try to avoid in my life—death, funeral homes, the homebound, and dealing with all issues surrounding these subjects.  However, it is exactly the book I needed to read, and I suspect, most people not only should read In the Midst of Life, but they absolutely need to.

Great literature has many qualities that define for humanity those elevated notions that we are distinguished by our ideas and the clarity we bring to the very complex, the dilemmas surrounding our most anguished fears (primarily death), and in the final analysis great literature is great because it changes us, forces us (individually, then culturally) to look deep within ourselves to evaluate who we are, where we are going, and what we want to be remembered for. I'm not about to stamp Rose's memoir with the sobriquet of great literature but he is well on his way to changing every reader, albeit one at a time, who touches this non-fiction sojourn.  Even if one's life is not drastically changed, one cannot read his memoir without being affected by its tenderheartedness, compassion, and perceptivity as he quietly steps into the lives of people who are dying.

Charles Rose, who was honored in 1998 as the Hospice Volunteer of the Year, is now into his mid-seventies.  He is a retired Auburn University English professor, who admits that in his lifetime he never did much in the way of activism or helping mankind to be a better place.  He wasn’t about to turn down a person when help was needed, but what had he really done in his life to help others?  According to Rose, not too much.  But after his retirement, Rose had pockets of time to think about his life during his drives and his daily meditations and writing sessions in a local Burger King, and it’s during these meditative entr’actes when he began to ponder all that he had not done in his life and how he felt the desire to help others in some manner.  He describes his crossroads:

I crossed a narrow bridge over the railroad about five miles away from Waverly.  The road leveled out, the ruts giving way to tar-speckled asphalt.  For a moment, I felt I was in the middle of nowhere, on my way from one place to another without knowing why.  It came over me—what was I doing for others, apart from those who were close to me? I wasn’t likely to turn a beggar away, but did that make me a good Samaritan?

Part of Rose’s motivation for helping others stems from his lament that he had not participated in the Civil Rights Movement, although he supported it in a fledgling way from a distance while a young professor, but certainly he never took to the streets, and although he opposed the Viet Nam War, he did so from a safe distance with a “bourbon and water close at hand.”  The only thing Rose could muster up from his past that had any sense of good samaritainship was signing a bail bond, thus mortgaging his house, for two seventeen-year-old girls accused of drug possession.  This act of kindness allowed them to be released from the Opelika jail.  In the end, neither girl absconded authority and Rose retained his mortgage.  Hardly a hardcore activist, but none the less, a beginning for Rose.  However, it would be almost thirty-five years before Rose began the apprenticeship as a hospice volunteer.  This is where Rose’s life changes, and with it, the reader is absorbed into the world of ordinary people who have become sick and in great need of another person’s care, but I think, most of all, these patients were much in need of another person’s fellowship as they spent their finals days homebound and in many case, bedridden.

I first read Rose’s memoir a little more than a year ago, and I knew I wanted to write a review about how a man in his seventies can made dramatic changes in his life, but much like Rose in his younger days, I procrastinated, to make the effort, if any.  Perhaps it is ironic that I began, for the first time, reading In the Midst of Life the same week the Terry Schiavo story garnered full press coverage in the United States and abroad.  I approached the Schiavo story, at best, as a disinterested spectator, and thought of it more or less as an unfortunate circumstance for all involved.  But what occurred is a transformation regarding the entire idea of life—through Schiavo’s life and the lives of the four patients Rose visited on a weekly basis—Lonnie Simmons, a 76-year-old black man; Howard Carr, a 74-year-old white World War II veteran; Larry Beckwith, a 54-year-old white chemistry professor at the Tuskegee Institute; and, Cassie Binton, a 93-year-old black woman—all with terminal cancer.

Each of these folks was holding on to this life as best he or she could.  But it was inevitable, the outcome, and while you as the reader knew what was to come, you were hoping that some miracle who appear.  And where Terry Schiavo debacle was played out on a national stage, these patients all passed quietly.  Yet, what this book did was elevate one to think a little more about what is going on, take into consideration the frailty of life, and appreciate one’s current circumstances, for like any of Rose’s patients, it can change very quickly. 

Rose utilizes a very detailed narrative as he captures the lives of the people he visits, taking notice of the minute—knickknacks, the dog in the yard, the 100 watt window air-conditioner, specific photographs, a fire hydrant in someone’s yard, and on the wall the crocheted letters spelling out PROMISE LITTLE, DO MUCH and GOOD DEEDS LIVE LONG—all little mementos showing that each house (without being sentimental here) is where a life was lived and people were loved, and although someone here may be dying, they are among friends and loved ones.

Rose begins his journey simply as a man who wants to help out in some way then sits in a Burger King every day and writes about his experiences without being preachy or self-serving.  I do not believe that Rose set out to change the world or himself—he simply wanted to help, but what occurs is a transcendence of the narrator, very quickly mind you, from a man of sheltered distance to a man who truly cared and felt grief after coming to know these people during his weekly visits where he read Bible passages, The Hobbit, drew sketches or talked to them about things they found important.  As a reader you do not fall in love with the characters as you would in a novel but you come to respect their lives and what they were going through.  For instance, Howard Carr was a World War II veteran in the 102^nd Cavalry Command under General Patton.  Rose’s conversations with Carr reveal the pride Carr felt as a solider—one of the first things he told Rose was that he was under the command of General Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander, referencing the importance of his duty.  Rose read to him the Bible andHuck Finn, and there was the genuine concern from Rose for the use of the word “nigger” and how it may have bothered Carr, a white man.  Rose chose to use the term “N-word” when he came to it in the text.  Rose’s sensibilities for all people he encounters play out this way—a true respect for their lives.  Then after many visits to Howard Carr, Rose wrote:

Before I left I said I’d have a look at Howard.  I went back to the bedroom by myself.  Howard lay with his head to one side, the black hole of his mouth cranked open, his eyes glued shut.  I stayed close to the door, listening to his heavy breathing, waving my left hand back and forth a few times, before I left him there, asleep in his bed.

Howard Carr died the following Sunday, at the age of seventy-four. On Monday morning, I received a telephone call from Lee Merritt. Howard had had a seizure, she said, and had been in considerable pain.

Rose’s recollections are very observant about what people thought and said about their life, and  there is the true tenor of the pain associated with the patients.  When “Cassie Binton died on October 29, 1999” Rose recalls the last time her saw her in late September:

The first thing Eileen did when we got to the bedroom was drain mucus out of Cassie’s esophagus.  Eileen forced Cassie’s head back and inserted a plastic tube into Cassie’s mouth.  The squat machine on the floor hummed, slurped a tobacco brown liquid into a Tupperware-like container. . . .  Finally, Eileen worked the tube out of Cassie’s mouth.  Cassie’s lower lip sagged, her eyes showed relief.

“Mister Rose brought you a pretty flower, sug.”

. . . I said something—I brought you a camellia—inadequate, not enough.  Cassie’s fingers closed on the vase.  We both held it, fingertips touching, our eyes on the red camellia.

"Thank you," Casiise whispered. Those were the last words I heard her utter.

In the end, Rose asked himself over and over what all of this meant.  He concludes with one possibility that “. . . the feeling has persisted—one keeps plodding on, unable to break out of existence, its multilayered contradictions, its crooked roads that seem to lead nowhere.”  But it’s not as dreary as this and the road does lead us onward as Rose demonstrates.  He understands that someone will be there to help us through the journey as “the cottony sky memorialized the fleeting moments.”

It was Larry Beckwith who told Charles Rose that he read very well, like an actor, and wondered if Rose had ever been an actor.  No, he had not.  But Rose’s narration reads with the fluidity of a seasoned orator.  It took a second reading and a distance of about eighteen months for me to think about Charles Rose’s memoir the way I needed, to give it enough time to gestate in my mind, to find the words I knew I wanted to say about it—it’s really about life and death, and in the end how we avoid it, pretend it doesn’t really exist, and if we are convincing enough, we might be able to pretend, fool ourselves, in to believing it won’t happen to us.  Do yourself a favor—read this book because somewhere down the road we will all face any number of similar circumstances.