
The Work of Our Hands: Hospes

Caring for Maria revealed the disjointed nature of our medical system, the inadvertent gaps in communication and care between home and institution. I was struck by how ill-prepared I was for the end-of-life process.


—Emma Lewis Acker, The Grief Deck
Written during the early weeks of lockdown in 2020, this description of my art process serves as a kind of poem-recipe that could be followed by anyone. I envisioned a child stuck inside a small Brooklyn apartment with only basic materials at hand. This prompt, accompanied by an image of my artwork, is one of sixty cards in The Grief Deck, a tool kit designed to navigate grief and loss. Developed during the dark early months of COVID-19, this collaborative project brought together disaster relief experts, artists, and grief workers to offer “rituals, meditations, and tools” for processing complex emotions.
In times of shock and disorientation, we reach for liturgy, and if we have none, we create it. Through this project, I realized that the rhythm and ritual of my process told a story that is personal yet universal.
My art practice was born out of uncertainty. Raised in New Zealand, I moved to New York City in the early 1990s. There, I met my husband, and our three children were born and mostly raised in the five boroughs. We were New Yorkers through and through. However, a serious health crisis and subsequent financial troubles after 2008 led us to unexpectedly move to Boston for nearly three years. When we returned to Brooklyn in the summer of 2017, an opportunity arose: my husband heard a space was available in his friend’s art studio and suggested I take it for a while. I had no art practice at the time, but I saw this as a gift and a kind of threshold. I knew I had to show up, even though I didn’t know what I would create.

Entering this raw, industrial space regularly to face the unknown, I began with small tasks. I acquired various materials: salvaged brown paper, vibrant acrylic paints, thrifted fabric, pencils, needle, and thread. Gradually, a process began to unfold through play and practice. I discovered that exploration itself became my act of creation.
During this period, I became aware that my oldest and most elderly friend in the city was declining in health. A shift had happened while I was in Boston, and my fiercely autonomous friend was dying. I began visiting Maria every Friday, becoming intimately involved in her care during the final two years of her life. Each week, walking from Brooklyn to her apartment in Greenwich Village across the Williamsburg Bridge, was a ritual, preparing me for the uncertainty of what I would find on the other side of her door. In her space, I learned to receive, listen, and observe.
Caring for Maria revealed the disjointed nature of our medical system, the inadvertent gaps in communication and care between home and institution. I was struck by how ill-prepared I was for the end-of-life process. It seemed wrong that modern life lacked a general understanding of how to care for the dying, a gap that extended to many of my friends, including those in my church community.
My weekly routine began to center around two anchors: visiting Maria and working in my studio. It was grounding to work with my hands and freeing to the mind—painting large sheets in rich colors, tearing them into pieces and stitching them into rows of color and pattern. Order and disorder, seeking and finding, strict pattern and organic chance. The process helped integrate my body, mind, and spirit, reflecting on my past, present, and future. It became a witness, a story left behind.
I remembered the birth doula support I received while having my children and wondered if a similar role existed for the end of life. I discovered the end-of-life doula movement, which had been growing steadily during the 2000s, providing nonmedical, compassionate, and practical support to the dying and their loved ones. With generational knowledge of end-of-life care lost to most of us in the West, I welcomed this training as a way to redeem what we have abdicated.

Institutional medical settings have their own rhythm and ritual. Visiting at the bedside creates space in the midst of the beeps and bustle to bear witness to the dignity inherent in us all. And I have learned this works upon the visitor as much as the visited. Peaceful, unhurried presence and active listening allows a person to feel seen, soothed, and secure even in a crowded double room with staff coming and going—even when nothing can be fully healed or fixed. Poet Christian Wiman articulates this experience for me in his book My Bright Abyss: “Christ comes alive in the communion between two people.”1
And then COVID hit—bringing silence, fear, and loss. All hospice visits were off, and art-making moved from my studio to my basement. I would creep downstairs before Zoom school and work hours, glad for a practice to enter into in the dark. I would pray the Daily Office readings, then pick up the next task—chalking fabric or ripping paper or placing torn colored pieces in a row. In repetitive action I could continue to meditate, even in the uncertainty and stress of those anxious COVID days. This liturgy made space for me in the midst of trouble to remember what is lasting. I stitched my way forward through those dark mornings, reminding myself of the promises of the One who knows, loves, and sustains. I was sewing myself into the truth.
The Exodus in Place series emerged from those early weeks of lockdown, embodying a path out and through. As weeks turned into months, the work shifted into a new series I eventually named Social Distance. Looking back now I still feel the constriction in the tight, gray colors, the armor-like scales, and recognize the squares as screen light. The way through was taking a long time.
By January 2021, I resumed home visits with a new private client on Park Avenue and began serving coffee at a drop-in center for the unhoused at All Angels’ Church on the Upper West Side. This volunteer work was a first step toward building relationships with people living on the street and the organizations that care for them, setting the stage to integrate end-of-life care into these services.

By 2022 a friend and I began collaborating on ways to encourage churches to face mortality together in community. Churches are uniquely equipped to engage their own liturgical practices with fresh intent, order, and generational wisdom—“to become competent with regard to the realities of life” as theologian Derek Kidner says.2 Our initiative, Here to Honor, hosts workshops and events on death literacy in the context of community, across the city.
In September 2023, I had my first art show, Hospes, at Neighbor, a gallery and community space in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. The Latin noun hospes can mean guest, host, or place of respite, reflecting the true meaning of hospitality. It embodies what I have witnessed around both the living and the dying. Hospitality is not hierarchical, static, and transactional, but a symbiotic relationship between people who both give and receive, receive and give. It is the love-your-neighbor earthly refraction of the dancing Trinity.
I have discovered that hospitality is a form of liturgy, and liturgy a form of hospitality. I strive to practice this liturgical hospitality daily in public and private, in solitude and in relationships, from the top of the city to the bottom. I seek to find (and to offer) moments of respite in the turmoil of our times.


Notes
1. Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 20.
2. Derek Kinder, The Proverbs: An Introduction and Commentary (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1972), 310.