Her face was unremarkable, but her blood left stains on my teal cotton dress. The splotches were almost purple, marbled like an ink blot, by the time they came for her. I was thirteen.

This is how I became a death doula. Not by choice, but because I was the only other person there at the bus station that night. It's not that I liked it, her dying—it was June, and not really the season for it—but I liked holding her on the metal bench waiting for the cops and paramedics to arrive. They would ultimately arrive too late, and I was there in her final moments, with my hand pressed against the deep cut in her side. It was disgusting. Her name was Sally.

When she couldn't speak, I held her closer. And when she died, her body made a soft wet sound, like a sprinkler shutting off. Just my own breathing, and then the sirens shortly after. By the time the cars pulled up, the sidewalk beneath us was puddled.

I told the officers I didn't know what happened. We weren't traveling together. I didn't know her. I came for the last bus. She must have been stabbed before.

The station house was locked, I told the police. I just met her. We met on this bench.

Now I get paid to sit with people when they die. That's not all I do, but it's the bulk of the work. I'm there when a clammy hand goes cold. Young, old, long illness, or a random accident, I'm there as a bandage—as witness, caregiver, or makeshift priest. I'm silent if they want, or I say soothing, nothing things. Sometimes I even pretend to be a friend they've lost, or someone they never got the chance to tell off. That one is rarer, but it happens.

Everyone dies differently. Once I cradled the foot of an old woman because she asked me to, and then she told me that her only child had died years earlier in a car crash. She was driving the car. Every night her right foot moved independently in her sleep, trying and failing to brake. She asked me for forgiveness, and I gave it. I forgive all kinds of things.

In the end, at the bus station, all Sally could do was tap at my wrist with her thumb. If I close my eyes and keep absolutely still, I can feel it, her thumb, as we wait for a bus that neither of us will be able to take.