One Shift Was All It Took

My mentor keeps telling me to write my own story down instead of just other people's, so here's a small piece of it. I became a hospice nurse in Roanoke almost by accident, filling in for a coworker one shift. Standing at a dying man's bedside that night, I felt something ask for my attention the way nothing in my life had asked before, quiet and absolute, and I understood I'd found the work I was meant for before I understood why. Ten years later that same certainty meets me every time I walk into a patient's room, like I'm still being handed the same instruction.