The Times

SHE HELPS PEOPLE TO DIE.

There is a young woman in this city who helps people to die. She lives in a big, crazy-looking old house with a past, and her flat, like the spider's, is up a winding stair. Her door faces the top step and through its portiere of bamboo and glass beads the visitor could see, while rapping, a young woman—not so extra young, either—sewing at a window where there was a row of plants and a red bird whistling in a wooden cage.

In response to an invitation, called out with brisk cheeriness, the visitor entered and said:

"I am a person who likes to know things. I have come to ask if it is really true that you teach men and women to die?"

"Not a word of it," answered the young woman, rising in nervous protest, with her sewing in a brown, billowy heap between her arms. "I am neither clever nor good enough to teach people to conquer death according to my own lights. I simply help them to die to suit themselves."

But if they suited themselves they would keep on living, wouldn't they?"

"You have a great deal to learn of life if you know so little of death," she answered, resuming her rocker and motioning her visitor to another. "Why, I have watched with people who have thanked God with their last breath for allowing them to die."

It was an astonishing assertion, but, reflecting that the speaker must have a strong underpinning of facts to base it on, the person who likes to know things asked for an illustration. The owner of the little flat was a diffident woman, however, and persuasion failed to convince her that her life work could be interesting to anybody besides her patients and herself. Plainly, she was anxious to finish the brown wrapper, for while talking she snipped knots, pulled out basting threads, and as a last touch tacked on its white satin quilted front a spray of artificial snowdrops.

As the chronicler of social functions, the knowledge-hunting person had inventoried garments of every cut and fabric, from Parisian creations by Doucet to negligee wrappers made at home, but never in ballroom, theater or boudoir had she ever been called on to shorthand so insane a combination as white satin, cotton flowers and snuff-brown wool.

It wasn't a Mother Hubbard, for it had no yoke; nor a princess, for there wasn't a sign of a waist line. It was just long and baggy, with its little square of beflowered finery on the breast, and two rows of satin piping on the edge of the bulgy sleeves. Across the front was laid a separate piece shaped like a priest's stole, made of merino and bound with a bit of the white. When she had ripped out the last thread and commenced to fold it the Person caught hold of the hem to help.

"What sort of a frock is this, anyhow?" she asked.

"Why, don't you know a shroud when you see one?"

And the Person dropped it quick.

"A Catholic will wear this shroud. It is the uniform of the scapular. All her life she has worn the badge of the Virgin, and it is her wish to be buried in it. Dear old soul, she will be so thankful when I take it to her tonight."

"You don't tell me you are going to horrify her with the sight of her own burial clothes! I should become a raving maniac if I saw mine."

"Granted. But Bridget wants hers."

"Would it not be well to refuse to humor so barbarous a whim? It seems to me I would lead her thoughts to higher things."

That would be making her die your way instead of her own. You would be like the girl who attended an old woman in Jackson Alley last week. The poor old creature asked for one chapter in the Bible but the girl insisted upon reading another on the ground that it was more befitting the occasion. It might have been more fitting, but it wasn't what the poor soul wanted.

"And do you always humor their whims?"

When I don't, it's because I can't. I honestly try to prepare my patients for their coming journey, but I do not consider myself justified in making them travel by the same road that I myself hope to go by some day.

My last case was an old, old colored man, whose dying wish was to hear once more that old, old ditty, 'Jim Crow.' I sang the few stray bits I could remember while his withered hands, clammy with death, tried to pat juba to the words. I knew he was back again in his quarters on the old plantation and that he was happy with his wife and pickaninnies at his side. I might have insisted upon a hymn, but he didn't want a hymn. He wanted what he asked for, and I gratified his wish. That's what I do every time."

"And did he die then?"

He died then—and died his own way."

"That was your last case; tell me of your first."

That was Mary. Yes, I will tell you about Mary, because I always feel as if my life began with her death, though it isn't easy to put the feeling in words. It was like this:

One black, windy night, nine years ago, I was skirt dancing my way home from work, when just as I was blowing around a corner I stumbled against something huddled against a fence. It was a scrap of a woman with a humped back, and when I touched her, she screamed. The dressmaker she worked for had turned her away because she puckered her seams and made clumsy knots to her threads.

"She was homeless, without a cent. When I got a good look at her I saw she had a coat on you could shoot straws through and her body was nothing but bones. I brought her here and after I had slipped her into that cot and given her a cup of hot tea, she piped out—I'll never forget it—'I am so glad God has given you this lovely home because you are so good.'

"Well, I laughed, though I knew in my heart I wanted to cry, for I was nothing short of diabolical in those days, and you can see the room for yourself. For one thing, I was ugly, and couldn't get reconciled to it. I resented the fact that I should look as though nature had cut me out at random like a child snips paper dolls, while all around me pretty girls were as plentiful as leaves on a summer hedge. I hated to teach music, but I had to do it or starve. I loathed living here alone, like an owl on a high limb, when I wanted to be a magpie among my chattering kind, but it was cheap and I could practice my scales without raising the neighborhood, so there was nothing to do but stay.

"I tell you, I was hateful clear through, but I was ashamed to let the poor little thing know what a mistake she had made in me, and I pretended I liked the room.

"Mary stayed with me most two weeks and then—then she went away. Just before she was sent for she asked me for the last time to tell her about her future home.

" 'It is a very happy place, Mary,' I said, 'where you can never be poor nor lonely again.'

" 'And you are sure I shall be an angel, like all the others?'

"You will be a beautiful angel, with shining wings—"

" 'But I don't want wings,' she interrupted with feverish anxiety. 'I want to walk so straight that all the saints and angels will turn to watch me, and say: "Oh, look at Mary's lovely back"—you said they would, won't they?'

" 'Yes, dear, yes.'

"And even if they know about the hump here and the puckered seams and the big knots, they won't turn me out, will they? You said they wouldn't, you know.'

I told her it was sure to be as we had talked it over, and then, after a bit, happy in the belief that she was going to heaven without wings, she died.

"Since that night I have helped many people to die, and they have each done it in their own particular way. When my turn comes I know exactly the way I want to go, and I presume you do the same."

"I have no set plans as yet," answered the reporter, rising, and feeling, some way, that it was an honor to shake the young woman's hand. But if my hour comes before yours, I hope that you will be by to help me to die either my own way or yours.