The work was preparation. You could not know what your dying self would need, but you could know yourself well enough to make reasonable guesses, and you could practice the kind of presence that would be useful in approximately thirty seconds. Vel had been doing this work for seven years.
She had, in the first three years, believed the work was about knowledge. If you understood yourself thoroughly enough, your dying self would have what it needed. She had developed detailed frameworks. Her clients left sessions with action items.
She had, in the following four years, understood that the work was about something else. Availability, maybe. The ability to be fully there without interpreting or solving, to sit with yourself in the thirty seconds that the Office acknowledged was approximately all you got.
Eight months ago, she had received a diagnosis. She had twelve pages of preparation notes. She had worked on them for three months. She had cut them, one evening, to half a page. She was not sure the half page was the right half.
She still had seven years of professional knowledge. She was not sure how much of it would apply to her own thirty seconds.
Today's client was sixty-three. He had been working with her for eight months. He had gradually moved, across their sessions, from framework to something quieter. He had stopped taking notes four months ago.
He said, today: I want her to know it wasn't frightening.
He had not told Vel who she was. Vel did not ask. That was part of the work: knowing what not to ask.
She wrote in his file: client has arrived at the relevant thing. Then she drove home and sat with her half page of preparation notes for a long time without changing them.