Today was my first day back in hospice, and this time as the provider. The morning began with the high desert sun casting its clear light over Flagstaff. I set out early, the road stretching ahead like a ribbon, driving 2.5 hours toward Yarnell. It’s the kind of drive where the landscape changes in slow poetry, pine forests thinning into open rock, the scent of juniper giving way to warm dust.

My first stop was a modest home where a husband was caring for his wife in hospice. His voice carried the weight of love pressed into duty, the kind that bends the back but not the spirit. As he spoke, I thought of the two years I spent as a hospice nurse; the quiet rooms, the sighs, the small mercies. He said that he didn’t get assistance from anybody and that he was exhausted, but I reminded him that for today, he was doing his best and that his best was enough.

The second visit was to a mother and son. She, the patient. He, the caregiver trying to hold together the pieces of a life rearranged by illness. Their story mirrored one I knew too well, my last hospice case as an RN, a son who tried with all he had until the exhaustion pulled him into the arms of alcohol. His mother died months later after I stopped visiting as a nurse, and this January, he too was gone. The memory sat in my chest like a stone, the kind you carry but never put down.

After those visits, I pointed my car toward Sedona, where red rocks rise like ancient cathedrals and light burns gold on the cliffs. I stopped to take a picture of the road, the kind of image that holds both places inside me. Driving back into Flagstaff at dusk, the town glowed under the shadow of the San Francisco Peaks. It struck me again; my life now is a weaving of these landscapes and the human stories that bridge them.