"Mr. Dwyer came into my program in March of 2019," Antoinette said. "He was in my seventh training class. Since then I've trained eighty-four men. Sixty-one finished. Twenty-two are still active. I keep a book." She touched the envelope without opening it. "Mr. Dwyer has logged two thousand one hundred and forty hours at bedside. That's the most of any man in the program. I don't say that because more hours makes you a better man. Some of my best companions only sat with two or three patients and then couldn't do it anymore, and that's no shame. I say it because I want you to understand that he didn't come to us for a certificate. The certificate's forty hours. He did his forty hours in 2019. The other two thousand he did because he kept showing up."
She told them about the work. She told it plainly, without decoration, and Neal, listening, understood for the first time what it was his son did on the days Sean's letters said only, Busy week on the unit. She told them about turning a dying man every two hours through the night so the skin on his hips and heels would not break down. About moistening a man's mouth with a little pink sponge on a stick when he could no longer drink. About sitting for eleven hours straight in a plastic chair beside a bed in the health services unit, with a correction officer on a stool at the door, because the rule was nobody dies alone, and the rule had to be kept by somebody. About men who had not been touched by another human being in kindness in thirty, forty years, who did not know what to do when a companion took their hand, who pulled away, who cried, who held on.
"I want to tell you about one patient," she said. "Cyril Mahoney."
She said that Cyril Mahoney had come into the system in 1979 at the age of twenty-four for a killing in a bar in Lowell. That he had been in for forty-three years. That his family had stopped visiting in 1988 and stopped writing in 1994. That he had been, for most of those years, by his own description and the description of everyone who knew him, a mean, frightening, dangerous man, and that by the time he was seventy and dying of liver cancer in the health services unit at Norfolk he weighed a hundred and eight pounds and was mostly afraid.
"He didn't want a companion," she said. "He threw a cup of water at the first one. He called the second one names I won't say in front of the board. Mr. Dwyer was the third. Mr. Mahoney told Mr. Dwyer the first night that he knew who he was, that he'd read about him, that he was a cop's kid and he'd never have done a day of hard time if his father had been anybody else, and that he could go to hell." Antoinette paused. "Mr. Dwyer said, Yes, sir, that's probably true. And he sat down in the chair. And he stayed. He was there every shift he was allowed for seven weeks. He read Mr. Mahoney westerns out loud, Louis L'Amour, because that's what Mr. Mahoney had read before his eyes went. He learned to shave him. He wrote letters for him to a sister in New Hampshire, which she didn't answer. And on the night of November ninth, 2022, at about three in the morning, Mr. Mahoney asked Mr. Dwyer to hold his hand, and Mr. Dwyer held it, and Mr. Mahoney died about forty minutes later."
She stopped. She looked down at the envelope on the podium. Then she looked up at the board again.
"I've sat at a lot of deathbeds," she said. "I want to tell you what Mr. Dwyer did afterward, because it's the thing that made me certain. After a patient dies, the companion's job isn't done. We wash the body. It's an old practice; most hospices have stopped, but the men asked for it, and the Department allowed it. Mr. Dwyer washed Mr. Mahoney. Another companion helped him. And when they were done, the officer on the door told me later, Mr. Dwyer stood at the foot of the bed for a long time, and then he said, out loud, to nobody, This man was somebody's son. And then he went back to his unit and asked to see the chaplain, and he asked the chaplain how a person could write to the family of somebody he'd killed, if they didn't want to hear from him, and whether there was a way to do it that wouldn't hurt them more. And the chaplain told him that the victim services office keeps apology letters on file, that you write it and they hold it, and the family can ask for it if they ever want it, and if they never ask, it stays there." She did not look across the aisle. "He wrote it that week. As far as I know, it's still there."
Across the aisle, Sheila Galvin sat with her hands folded on the head of her cane.
"I'm not here to tell the board he's a good man," Antoinette said. "That's not my job. I don't know what a good man is. I know what a man who keeps showing up looks like. I've seen it, two thousand one hundred and forty hours of it." She picked up the envelope. "This is the book. Every patient we've had, every companion, every hour. I'm going to leave a copy with Mr. Taft for the board. Thank you."