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The past few years have drastically changed how we think about our relationship to work, perhaps permanently. However, they haven’t changed the fact that billions of people on this planet spend about half their waking hours exchanging labor for money in order to secure food and shelter. As such, work has remained an inescapable part of one’s identity. “What do you do?” is still a small-talk question not because the answer is usually interesting, but because the answer tells you something about the skills and knowledge that person has amassed. And when the answer is interesting, it’s hard not to feel some measure of admiration for someone whose experience falls so outside your own.

I’ve always been fascinated by those whose daily occupations carry meaning, promise adventure, or are in any way out of the ordinary. Of course, everybody’s dream job is different, but imagine swapping sitting at a computer or working on a production line for clearing landmines, dodging tornadoes, or braving the icy waters of the Bering Sea. Not for everyone, of course—but what astonishing ways to earn a living. 

The examples you’ll encounter below range from the inspirational to the unfathomable. Who would want to toil 18-hour days, or climb to dizzying heights with little to no protection? For some, that sort of life holds a deep appeal, and herein lies the hook that draws you into these stories: In attempting to understand the motivations of others, we are by reflex attempting to understand ourselves. Each of these pieces moved me in some way, and I hope that they move you also.

Chasing Tornadoes (Priit J. Vesilind, National Geographic, April 2004)

As this mesmerizing article points out, it was the 1996 film Twister that first brought the occupation of “tornado chaser” to widespread public attention. Twister was a big deal upon its release, and I can vividly recall being spellbound by the then-cutting-edge special effects: dark and furious tendrils reaching down from the sky to pluck people, cars, and houses into the sky, spinning like toys, seemingly cut adrift from gravity itself. That film, as all movies do, exaggerated the hazards faced by its protagonists—but, judging by this primary account, not by very much. That meteorologists are still throwing themselves at deadly storms nearly 30 years on tells much of the complexity behind this destructive and spectacular weather phenomenon. 

In order to study tornados, you have to get close enough to manually drop heavy probes in their path, sometimes less than 100 meters from an approaching maelstrom. In a way, it’s comforting to know that, for all our technology and sophistication, we are in no way removed from the natural systems that surround us. Nature can always outdo us, will always win. That’s not to minimize the human cost, however, nor the bravery and determination of the tornado chasers. From the very beginning, in which an entire village is sucked into the air, this piece delivers mind-boggling drama, immersing us in a disparate group of specialists who race across the United States to seek out something most others would sooner avoid—all in the interest of furthering our understanding of an uncontrollable phenomenon.

But we’re late, and out of position. If we try to drive around the storm, we won’t have enough daylight left to see it. So we decide to “punch the core” of the thunderstorm, forcing our way into the “bear’s cage,” an area between the main updraft and the hail. It’s an apt name: Chasing tornadoes is like hunting grizzlies—you want to get close, but not on the same side of the river. Sometimes you get the bear; sometimes the bear gets you.

And so we head straight into the storm and find ourselves splattering mud at 60 miles an hour (97 kilometers an hour) on a two-lane road, threatening to hydroplane, visibility near zero. Anton is less than comforting. “The hail in the bear’s cage smashes windows and car tops,” he shouts, grinning. “The smaller stuff is kept aloft by the updraft, and only the large chunks fall. It’s like small meteorites banging down. Ha-ha-ha!”

In The Race For Better Cell Service, Men Who Climb Towers Pay With Their Lives (Ryan Knutson and Liz Day, ProPublica, May 2012)

Once again, we encounter a piece that draws aside the invisible curtain to glimpse the grueling efforts that enable our everyday creature comforts—in this case, the world of mobile communications networks. If you’ve ever shuddered at a TikTok video of a worker balanced precariously atop a tower at vertigo-inducing heights, this article probably isn’t for you. Yet, for such a dangerous job—cell tower climbing routinely claims up to 10 times the number of human lives as the conventional construction industry—it pays a relatively modest wage. What is it, then, that drives people to take up such work?

As a project manager quoted in the piece says, “You’ve got to have a problem to hang 150 feet in the air on an eight-inch strap.” Yet the workers featured in this piece, despite some suffering horrible injuries, clearly love their jobs. It’s not hard to understand the buzz that must come from routinely doing something that most people could not (and would not) do, along with sense of freedom that must come with climbing aloft to look down upon the world. As with the cobalt mining industry—itself the subject of another story in this list—there is a dark underside to this business, as sub-contractors routinely cut corners and take risks in the quest for a few extra dollars.

The greatness in Knutson and Day’s article, as with others collected here, lies in its ability to bring to life the stories and personalities of the people whose hard work makes life easier for us all. If you’re reading this on your smartphone, take a moment to consider the often-obscured reality behind mobile technology—a technology that, by its very nature, is largely invisible.

The surge of cell work forever altered tower climbing, an obscure field of no more than 10,000 workers. It attracted newcomers, including outfits known within the business as “two guys and a rope.” It also exacerbated the industry’s transient, high-flying culture.

Climbers live out of motel rooms, installing antennas in Oklahoma one day, building a tower in Tennessee the next. The work attracts risk-takers and rebels. Of the 33 tower fatalities for which autopsy records were available, 10 showed climbers had drugs or alcohol in their systems.

The Cobalt Pipeline (Todd C. Frankel, The Washington Post, September 2016)

This is where mobile technology begins: the dangerous and dirty business of mining for cobalt, a mineral essential to the construction of smartphones and laptops. As a species we are finally becoming aware that every modern amenity carries an ecological price, and that price is often paid most dearly (and ironically) by nations that are monetarily poor but resource-rich. In our relentless drive “forward,” it is often the most vulnerable who pay the price. Mining is not a calling for these men; it is a necessity.

However, there is hope to be found in this troubling story—specifically, the very fact of its existence. The best journalism reduces global issues to a human scale, and by taking us into the lives of Congolese miners risking life and limb in pursuit of the rare metal, writer Todd C. Frankel forces us to ask ourselves some uncomfortable questions.  

But Mayamba, 35, knew nothing about his role in this sprawling global supply chain. He grabbed his metal shovel and broken-headed hammer from a corner of the room he shares with his wife and child. He pulled on a dust-stained jacket. A proud man, he likes to wear a button-down shirt even to mine. And he planned to mine by hand all day and through the night. He would nap in the underground tunnels. No industrial tools. Not even a hard hat. The risk of a cave-in is constant.

“Do you have enough money to buy flour today?” he asked his wife.

She did. But now a debt collector stood at the door. The family owed money for salt. Flour would have to wait.

Mayamba tried to reassure his wife. He said goodbye to his son. Then he slung his shovel over his shoulder. It was time.

Making Our Home Safe Again: Meet the Women Who Clear Land Mines (Jessie Williams, The Observer, January 2021)

War leaves scars on every country it touches, sometimes literally: one of its most insidious instruments is buried explosives, set to trigger at the touch of a human foot. Land mines have been a topic of discussion for many years, catapulted to the front of the news in 1997, when Princess Diana raised awareness by walking through a field of live explosives in Angola. (She was a guest of the Halo Trust, an organization that undertakes the arduous and dangerous task of clearing such places for the local populace.)

Little can be more terrifying than the knowledge that each step you take could be your last. It’s a sudden, senseless, death, one without discernment or mercy. But in this inspiring story, life comes full circle, as Hana Khider returns to her ancestral homeland of the Sinjar mountains in northwestern Iraq. When Khider was a child, her mother told her stories of the family homeland they were forced to flee; now, as an adult, she works as part of a team of deminers, making that homeland safe once again. As meaningful as this work is, it also carries with it the deadliest of dangers: an average of nine people a day still fall victim to these terrible remnants of conflict.

At the start of this month, a 24-year-old man working for MAG was killed in an explosion at a munitions storage facility in Iraq’s Telefar district – a reminder of the dangers these deminers face every single day. Iraq has around 1,800 sq km of contaminated land (an area bigger than Greater London) stemming from multiple conflicts, including the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, the Gulf War, the 2003 US-led invasion, and the Isis occupation of 2014. The Iraqi government has a target deadline of February 2028 to clear the country, which Morgan thinks is optimistic. “Last year, operators cleared just over 15 sq km,” he says. Covid-19 hasn’t helped. This year MAG has managed to disarm 1,200 mines; usually it would be 6,750 mines.

Dispatches: Life on an Alaskan Crab Boat (Andy Cochrane, Men’s Journal, April 2021)

We have always projected a certain romance onto the idea of working on the high seas, and a dignity upon those individuals brave enough to do so. For this piece, journalist Andy Cochrane signs up for a week’s work on the fishing boat Silver Spray, one of just 60 such vessels responsible for supplying all of North America with snow crab. Facing long hours, rough water, and freezing conditions, the work is as grueling as could be imagined, but surprisingly Cochrane encounters only good humor, pragmatism, and an inspiring sense of brotherhood amongst the crew.

This is work that is as fundamental to human existence as can be found. People have to eat, after all. But what really strikes me about this piece—and is a sentiment echoed by its author—is the remarkable positivity of the fishermen, which surely can’t be put down to a sense of pride and decent wages alone. Perhaps it’s the extreme conditions and the hardships that help foster such a sense of togetherness and wry determination. Whatever the cause, this is another absorbing peek into a job few of us would wish to undertake.

I was curious how these guys found their way to the industry and how they hadn’t burned out. Attrition is incredibly high, for obvious reasons—freezing temperatures, rough seas and long, exhausting hours. All three laughed off my greenhorn question, and we returned to tips on how I would survive the week.

Jose, an immigrant from El Salvador and father of two, has lived in Anchorage since the ’90s. Quiet, always smiling, and always working, he’s fished his entire career. Leo, raised in Samoa and now living in Vegas, also has two kids. Even with frozen fingers and toes, he never stopped making jokes. Jeffery, who lives half the year in the Philippines with his wife and three kids, would often give me a fist bump and say “you’ll be all right, everyone goes through this” after I puked, which happened 11 more times the first day.

Chris Wheatley is a writer and journalist based in Oxford, U.K. He has too many guitars, too many records, and not enough cats.

Editor: Peter Rubin
Copy Editor: Carolyn Wells

Much of the public response to language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has focused on all the jobs they appear poised to automate. But behind even the most impressive AI system are people — huge numbers of people labeling data to train it and clarifying data when it gets confused. Only the companies that can afford to buy this data can compete, and those that get it are highly motivated to keep it secret. The result is that, with few exceptions, little is known about the information shaping these systems’ behavior, and even less is known about the people doing the shaping.

“Instead of building a life in Ohio, we were like, let’s just get out of our leases, sell our cars, and basically all of our possessions,” Ryan said. “We’re just gonna travel the world.” Wagner sipped coffee out of a mason jar through a striped straw. “When we started, we thought, ‘Oh well, we’ll try it for a couple months,’” she said. “But now it’s almost been a year, and we haven’t talked about stopping.”

Wagner and Ryan were halfway through the circuit. In 11 months, they’d visited 10 countries, including Croatia, Morocco, Romania, Portugal, and Turkey. Their remaining itinerary included Argentina and Chile, followed by Japan, Singapore, Thailand, and the U.K. Even as they traveled, they saved money, by arbitraging their first-world incomes against the low cost of living in their stopover destinations. “We will probably buy a house eventually,” Wagner said. “But the more you travel, the longer the list of places you want to go.”

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My Tower Records experience is vastly different from Gonzales’ — famous artists and celebrities didn’t come into our store, for instance, and our Bay Area suburban strip mall location pales in comparison to the bustling, legendary location in the Village. But still, I appreciate the small moments he recounts, like his interview for the job, or running the register, or how employees raced to the stereo to change the music. I have similar fond memories from that glorious summer, when music became really important to me, and — with the encouragement of very expressive, interesting coworkers-turned-friends — when I embarked on my own journey of self-discovery.

Though I lived in Harlem and Jerry dwelled in Brooklyn, we often met in front of Tower when we planned on “hangin’ in the village.” We’d flip through racks of records for an hour or so, which was usually followed by smoking a joint in Washington Square Park while watching comedian Charlie Barnett. Back in those days, I had a bad habit of running late and, on one occasion, he befriended a guy begging for change in front of the store. An aspiring playwright, Jerry wrote a one-act about the encounter. Years later, I heard how fallen Grandmaster Flowers, a pioneering DJ from Brooklyn, used to shake his coin cup on that spot and I just knew that’s who Jerry had met. That same year I hung out with Jerry as he waited in line overnight to buy tickets for The Police’s Synchronicity Tour. That year we both worked as messengers in Manhattan, but we were ready to splurge our minimum wages on Sting.

Hickman’s remained the only private company in Arizona allowed to use incarcerated workers on its own turf. Two national experts in prison labor who spoke with Cosmopolitan — Corene Kendrick and Jennifer Turner, both with the American Civil Liberties Union — could cite no other instance of a state corrections department detaining people on-site at a U.S. corporation for the corporation’s express use.

Within days of the plan’s approval, a roughly 6,000-square-foot metal-sided warehouse on the Hickman’s lot at 6515 S Jackrabbit Trail in Buckeye, Arizona, had been repurposed from an apparent vehicle hangar into a bare-bones “dormitory.” It sat in plain sight, about 200 feet back from the road, near the Hickman’s corporate headquarters and retail store, where an electric signboard and giant 3D chicken beckon customers in for “local & fresh” eggs. Over the next 14 and a half months, some 300 women total would cycle through this prison outpost, their waking lives largely devoted to maintaining the farm’s operations while the pandemic raged.

Eleven of these women — all incarcerated for nonviolent offenses, which one could argue is beside the point — shared their firsthand accounts with Cosmopolitan. Our nearly yearlong investigation also turned up thousands of pages of internal ADCRR emails, incident reports, and other documents exposing a hastily launched labor experiment for which women were explicitly chosen. Housed in conditions described by many as hideous, the women performed dangerous work at base hourly wages as low as $4.25, working on skeleton crews decimated in part by COVID. At least one suffered an injury that left her permanently disfigured. These are their stories.

Unlike broken windows, burnout has shed its roots in the social scientific vision of urban crisis: We don’t tend to associate the term with the city and its tumultuous history. But it’s actually quite telling that Freudenberger saw himself and his burned-out coworkers as akin to burned-out buildings. Though he didn’t acknowledge it in his own exploration of the term, those torched buildings had generated value by being destroyed. In transposing the city’s creative destruction onto the bodies and minds of the urban care workers who were attending to its plight, Freudenberger’s burnout likewise telegraphed how depletion, even to the point of destruction, could be profitable. After all, Freudenberger and his coworkers at the free clinic were struggling to patch the many holes of a healthcare system that valued profit above access.

Many left critics of the burnout paradigm have faulted the concept for individualizing and naturalizing the large-scale social antagonisms of neoliberal times. “Anytime you wanna use the word burnout replace it with trauma and exploitation,” reads one representative tweet from the Nap Ministry, a project that advocates rest as a form of resistance. They’re not wrong. In Freudenberger’s chapter on preventing burnout, for instance, he exhorts us to “acknowledge that the world is the way it is” and warns, “We can’t despair over it, dwell on the pity of it, or agitate about it.” That’s psychobabble for Margaret Thatcher’s infamous slogan, “There is no alternative.” But if we excavate burnout’s infrastructural unconscious—its origins in the material conditions of conflagration—we might discover a term with an unlikely potential for subversive meaning. An artifact of an incendiary history, burnout can vividly name the disposability of targeted populations under racial capitalism—a dynamic that, over time, has ensnared ever-wider swaths of the workforce.

Anyone lucky enough to have a pet in this lifetime understands the pain of having to put that beloved down when the excruciating time comes. But, did you ever consider how repeatedly euthanizing sick and old pets takes its toll on on those trusted to provide a painless demise? At Slate, veterinarian Andrew Bullis helps us understand the high personal toll exacted on those burdened with offering the final compassion.

So, I’m left with euthanasia or no euthanasia. No euthanasia will lead to more suffering and more trauma for Lacey before she inevitably dies, likely a slow and agonizing death at that—or one done by her owner with a gunshot.

There in the clinic, Miller’s words come crashing back: “Do it flawlessly.” Lacey deserves that, at the very least. Despite her owners’ decision, she at least deserves to die in peace. “You will do it painlessly,” I tell myself.

Gosh, this job breaks you.

Still, it is not a job with universal appeal. While Q branch now has more women than men at senior levels, they are under-represented in the department as a whole. Ada is keen to change this, but the wider shortage of women in science and engineering makes recruitment more difficult. She is not from a technical background herself. Her strength is operational expertise honed on a series of overseas postings, where she learnt Arabic and ran agents, including in war zones. For some of this time she was also raising a family, which presented unusual practical problems. At the start of one posting, she was given an armoured car and became the first officer in the service to ask where the Isofix points were so she could insert her baby’s carseat. “There was a lot of scratching of heads and people saying, we haven’t had a request for one of those things before,” she says. “And actually, it turns out it’s very difficult to do.” (They did, eventually, find a way.)

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Lisa Bubert | Longreads | November 30, 2022 | 11 minutes (3,072 words)

When I was 19, a nursing home hired me to work as an aide. There wasn’t much to the interview that I remember, other than I agreed to come to work on time and take the certification course the home provided. In this course, I learned how to lift a frail person out of bed, how to wipe them, how to bathe them if bed-bound; how easily their skin tears, and how to touch so as not to cause a bruise. The head nurse was a short man with a thick north Texas accent and a handlebar mustache who finished the training with the advice to “treat each resident like they’re your grandmama.” The course lasted two weeks and came with the stipulation that I stay for at least six months. Employee turnover was high.

This job, caring for grandparents around the clock, paid $7.25 an hour — above minimum wage, the hiring manager boasted, which at the time in Texas was set at $5.15. This really was a great job, the other aides told me. It was steady work that came with a lunch break and health insurance for your kids, things that were lost on me. I was an anomaly in that job: a teenager, in college, white. 

None of my friends understood why I wanted to work there. Young people are scared of old people, which is to say all people are scared of old people, which is to say all people are scared of death. Death hung over the place like a ghost, the hospital smell embedded daily in my clothes. All I can say is that I wanted a real job and I liked old people. I’d already seen my share of dead bodies, thanks to the slew of open-casket funerals that came with a childhood spent in an aging rural community. Also, the home was the only place that called back when I applied.

The facility was broken into seven distinct hallways, with two aides assigned to each for their shifts. Each hall housed 15 or 20 residents, making each aide responsible for eight to 10 residents. There were no firm state or federal regulations on what the resident-aide ratio should be (and still aren’t), but 10-to-1 is considered easy street in most facilities. To be clear, this is still a terrible ratio. Imagine having to wake, bathe, dress, and hand-feed 10 elderly patients who need total assistance: buttoning shirts, brushing dentures, changing bedsheets for those who will have inevitably soiled the bed in the night. Imagine having to complete it all in an hour or less. It’s an impossible task. Which is why dentures don’t get brushed, baths don’t get offered, nightgowns are worn at the breakfast table. Now double it to 20 patients; this is what you have in many facilities across the country. 

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Hall One was for rehab patients, those who had suffered strokes or broken bones and were simply there until they could regain strength and rejoin the world (if they were lucky) or move to another wing (if they were less so). Hall Two was reserved for patients with dementia and Alzheimer’s. They were mostly ambulatory, which was great for those residents who liked to wander and terrible for the aides who had to keep track of them and everyone else. Halls Three and Four had a mean reputation, old folks who bit and scratched. One resident in that hall was a literal shit-flinger, known to keep her hands hidden until an aide was close enough to smear. Many of the Black residents were placed on these halls, creating a racist chicken-or-egg situation where the care was poor because the residents were difficult and the residents were difficult because the care was poor. Hall Five was a tale of two extremes — people who either needed a ton of help or none at all. Any aide was happy to get that assignment, though, because the extremes averaged out to something sustainable. Hall Six was for the bedridden. 

It was a toss-up whether Hall Three, Four, or Six was the worst assignment for aides — it depended on whether you felt like taking insults or blowing your back out. But Hall Seven was the hall everyone wanted: elderly people who were mostly lucid, mostly independent, who just needed a little help and some company. Hall Seven was heaven. And because I was young, too small to lift alone, and white, I got assigned to Hall Seven every time. 

I loved working Hall Seven because Hall Seven felt like home. I had grown up in the presence of old people, my grandparents some of my earliest caretakers. My father drove truck; my mother worked at the hospital by day, and had nursing school at night. She would dress me as I slept and shuffle me off to Granny K’s house at five in the morning, where my grandfather, Papa, was always awake and waiting, the local weather news segment on the TV glowing blue in the front window.

Granny K would make the meals, play with me, pick me up from school. We watched One Life to Live and General Hospital every summer day at 1 and 2 p.m. She was small and short, shrunken in her big, pink armchair. Papa was large, big-bellied, farted often, and smelled of peanuts and sweat. Granny K was sweet to me and harsh to everyone else; Papa was a teddy bear, grown soft in his old age. 

Papa died just a few years prior to my stint at the nursing home. The first sign of his illness was the loss of his round belly. He shrunk, then shrunk some more until he was confined to the hospital bed Granny K kept in the living room. Pancreatic cancer. We didn’t even try to fight. After he died, Granny K sank into a sullen, depressive loneliness I couldn’t understand, so I visited less and less until I moved to college and got work in the home that let me pretend everyone was my grandparent.

There was the lady who covered herself in beaded necklaces and split her secret stash of chocolate with me as we watched game shows and talked about boys. There was the man who wore a daily uniform of plaid shirt, khaki shorts, and Reeboks. There was the teeny tiny woman who couldn’t remember shit moment to moment but still thought all of this was pretty funny anyway. I’d take her to dinner with the other ladies who couldn’t remember shit and we’d sit and laugh about god knows what. She had no teeth so everything had to be pureed. I remember feeding her from piles of color on the dinner tray — green for peas, yellow for potatoes, brown for meat. 

Some of the residents refused to leave their rooms for dinner and would have their meals brought to them on a meal cart. Some of them had to be fed or they wouldn’t eat. Most of them refused even that, hell-bent on starving themselves out of existence. Take the food yourself, they’d tell the aide. You weren’t supposed to take the food, management said. That would be wrong. But things moved so fast that lunch breaks could pass untaken, and on days like that this was the only chance for food. An untouched butter roll, stale French fries, cold steak fingers, unopened cartons of juice. The chart truthfully updated — resident refused meal — the food in an aide’s mouth. Some wrapped the food to take home to children. You would take the food too, you just would. 

The entire elder care system operates on a mantra of out of sight, out of mind. Medical residencies feature little to no geriatric training; the profession experiences an annual turnover rate of 60 percent. A 2021 study found that turnover in nursing care facilities skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the average annual rate in 2020 at a shocking 128 percent. In other words, if you apply for a job at a nursing home, you can pretty well count on getting hired. For someone with little access to education living on the edge of poverty, this fact is a godsend. Yet, caveats lurk. There are countless reports of understaffing in nursing homes, underfunding, limited regulations where it matters (staff pay, patient ratio) and reels of red tape where it doesn’t (hours of required paperwork that detail how many ounces of water the resident drank, but not how they cry at night for their children). And while you may be trained on how to wipe from front to back, there’s no training to prepare you for the psychic toll of watching your people suffer until they die. 

There are plenty of reasons to see nursing homes as sad, neglectful places, and I’m sorry to say that my experience working in one did not change this perception. But I can also say that the perception has less to do with staffing, funding, and regulations (or lack thereof) and much more to do with our country’s fear of death, its rejection of vulnerability, and its subsequent inability to see the inherent dignity in people — especially in their vulnerable moments.

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Dying is a vulnerable act. There’s rarely the serenity we see in deathbed scenes. Instead, the pragmatic, much of which we view as shameful: the slow loss of function, the bowels loosed in bed, the sweat stench, the tonguing mouth, the hallucinatory terror, the whimpers, the rattle. You spent all this time learning how not to trip over your own feet and here you are now — older than anyone else in the room and forced to use a stroller, swaddled in diapers. You revert to a time when your mother held you, only your mother is gone. Your children (if you remember them) don’t visit, and why is that? 

Shame stems from a fear of disconnection. We live in a culture that increasingly connects old age with disconnection rather than dignity. Our friends pass on, our families visit less and less, we spend more time alone, helpless to arrest the breakdown of our own bodies. It’s no wonder the elderly — and those who care for the elderly — are steeped in a hot tea of shame. And because shame repels, it is no wonder our policies and priorities for eldercare are so lax as to be nearly criminal. Out of sight. Out of mind.

Granny K and Papa were both het up about “not being put into a home.” Papa didn’t have to, on account of the cancer. But no cancer came to save Granny K. She just got older and older and lonelier and lonelier until she couldn’t care for herself and my parents couldn’t leave their jobs to do it for her like she’d done for Papa. She went into assisted living, very reluctantly — though not until after I started working in my own facility. And by then, I’d seen how the sausage was made. 

I visited Granny K at the facility every time I came home. Short, quiet visits in her room that smelled of cough drops and Kleenex. The hum of her oxygen tank. The humidifier on high, turning the air wet. She would never say much past lamenting how terrible it all was, how she just wanted to die and be done with it. My visits grew shorter and shorter and then I took to calling her on Sunday mornings where I would hear more about how terrible everything was and how death would be a welcome ending. I called my mother crying, who then called Granny K and told her she couldn’t tell me those things anymore. My conversations with Granny K dwindled and dwindled, both of us playing a morbid waiting game to see how long it would take to get what we both wanted. 

Christmas 2012, I sprung Granny K from her facility for family dinner. As we drove home, the sun was setting across the fields in a dazzling display of purple and pink and rustling prairie grass and open, open pasture with room to run as far as the eye would allow. Live oaks with massive curling limbs cast long shadows in the hazy light. It was, by far, one of the more beautiful sunsets I’d ever seen, in a place that’s no stranger to such spectacle. Granny K sat up straight in the passenger seat, her eyes fixed out the window, taking in every sight, committing it to memory, presence. I wanted to say something, but stayed quiet. The moment was hers. 

We had Christmas dinner. We opened presents. My father offered to take Granny K back and the four of us — my mother, father, brother, and me — all went out to the car to see her off. It was the first time it had been just the four of us in years. A memory flickered to the surface of us eating around the dinner table when I wasn’t yet in grade school, before my brother got his first job and my mother worked nights. We said our goodbyes, watched Granny K’s small head disappear in the window as the car drove off. I already knew when I watched her watch that sunset that this would be the last time. 

It was; she died a week later. Just before, my mother called me and placed the phone at Granny K’s ear. I said I was glad to know her, that I enjoyed our time together. I could hear a clicking, the soft rattle in response. That was our last moment. But I prefer to remember the sunset. 

I worked at the nursing home until the six months were up and then I left. I’d had enough of the hours, the lifting, the side eye from the other aides who knew I wouldn’t stay. I didn’t need the job like they did. I was just a college kid. I was playing grown-up. 

A decade later, though, my training came in handy. May 2020, the height of the pandemic; my other grandmother, Granny Nawara, lay dying in a hospital bed. My mother had tried to keep Granny Nawara in her own home to care for her there, knowing the moment she went into a nursing facility would be the moment we could no longer sit with her. But it grew to be too much. My mother was a veteran nurse at our rural hospital; when the administration heard about Granny Nawara, they transferred her to a room there. I took my chances and flew to Texas to be with my mother as we watched Granny Nawara’s last days. 

For three days, we sat together in that room — my mother knitting a lovey for a new baby, me burying my head in work, Granny Nawara lying in bed, just breathing. Mom and I would trade off. Mom would check Granny for bedsores, sop a watery sponge to her cracked lips. I would rest a damp towel to Granny’s forehead and she would open her eyes for just a moment, see me, and smile. Mom spent the nights at the hospital, unwilling to leave. I went home to sleep in my childhood bed. The last night I told Granny good night, she gripped my hand with more strength than she’d had in weeks, pulled it to her chin, and wouldn’t let go. She blew a kiss and I stood there, letting her hold me until it grew late and I had to pry my hand out of her grasp. She would still be with us the next morning; she would only die after her older brother said his goodbye. Granny Nawara did always like to get permission. 

I have a hard time writing about this, not because it’s a traumatic memory, but because I got to do something so many others couldn’t in this pandemic. I sat with my grandmother as she died. And there is no act of love greater than to sit with someone as they face their deepest moment of vulnerability — an act of love denied to so many these last few years.

There’s plenty to be said about the ways the pandemic has laid bare the failures of our eldercare system, how our fear of weakness has driven our entire healthcare system to the brink, how we exorcise this fear through a cycle of abuse that directly impacts our old, young, and poor at alarming rates. How our abject terror of vulnerability robs us all of dignity. Dignity requires witness, to see and be seen; if we are too afraid to look, it slips away.

All I want to focus on now, then, is the sunset. A terribly beautiful sunset, one we all know is the last, one from which we cannot tear our eyes away. Commit that dazzling display to memory. Watch the light as we fade. 

One of my favorite tasks at the nursing home was supervising the 4 p.m. smoke break. Many of the residents were lifetime smokers and no nursing facility was going to curb that habit, so after breakfast and before dinner we’d wheel everyone to a small, glassed-in room off the corner of the dining hall. It stunk like only a room solely used by smokers could stink. Staff hated covering smoke time because of it. But it was also 15 minutes in which all you had to do was light cigarettes and make sure nobody burned themselves. I volunteered every time. 

Everyone’s assigned cigarettes were kept in locked cabinets. The families were responsible for keeping them stocked; no begging or borrowing loosies allowed. I’d separate the packs from their cartons, hand everyone their brand of choice, light them all with the management-issued lighter. Residents would relax back in their chairs, stare out the glass enclosure as though it was a window that looked outside, and drift off into some other beautiful world.

I loved smoke time for the pure peace and bliss of it; not just mine, but theirs. You could see their younger selves when it was smoke time, slouched back like a bunch of hoodlums, yakking and jawing like they were kids getting away with something. The muscle memory of the ritual — inhaling, holding, flicking into ashtrays, stubbing the smoke out when they were finished — transcended dementia. A few might forget, long lines of ash dangling at the ends of their lit cigarettes. But that’s why I was there. To remind them. 

Lisa Bubert is a writer and librarian based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Texas Highways, Washington Square Review, and more.

Editor: Peter Rubin

Copy Editor: Krista Stevens

She would look after three children in a stranger’s home and pour everything of herself into them. On some nights, her son would ask to speak to these children. She would put them on the phone and watch the children and her son grin at each other through a screen. She would listen to him ask the children sitting next to her, Do you love my mama?, listen to the children she had poured herself into smiling yes, and in that softness there would be a feeling she could start to hold on to.