This is Rumbull Strip America Heilman.

My son was born in 2003 in the fall.

I was living with his father in a small rented house in my hometown right off the

highway. I didn't have a lot of experience with babies. I didn't have any

friends who had any babies and in fact at the time I didn't have many friends I had just moved

back to Vermont after being away for a long time on the first morning after the

first night home with a baby I found a pot of soup on the front doorstep.

There was no note.

In the following day there was a tray of lasagna and it went on like this.

Friends of friends of friends and sometimes neighbors I'd never met bringing gifts to make our new life easier and sweeter

It's 13 years later, but thinking about that pot of soup on the doorstep still fills me with the most

profound gratitude. It's funny how humans seem to be at their most human around birth and then

again at death.

A few years after Henry was born in the next town over,

one of my oldest friends in the world was getting ready to die after a long illness.

She was home with her wife,

and the kitchen was full of soup and lasagna

and people doing things to make life easier and sweeter,

like doing dishes and arranging flowers. And right before Christina... and They were a volunteer hospice choir and even though no one in the house was particularly religious

I think they would all describe that moment as holy which is a word that gets easier to use in moments like those.

Today's episode is about a Volunteer Hospice Choir,

and it's produced by Sarah Brooke Curtis.

...