Five years ago, Rae’s friend Dennis spent his last days on the Inpatient Unit. On one of Rae’s daily visits, he noticed a guitar hanging on the wall in the lounge, beside a sign with the message “Please keep playing after I’m gone.”
He grabbed the guitar and went back to Dennis’s room.
They’d met back in 1992 and connected immediately through music and laughter.
That day years later at Victoria Hospice they laughed and played some of the old songs again. Songs that they wrote together and performed in the bands Jelly Foot and Red Eye Den. All the memories came flooding back.
After a while, when Dennis had fallen asleep, Rae decided to go back to the lounge and play a couple of cover tunes. A gentleman came out from adjacent room, with tears in his eyes, and he said, “That’s Led Zeppelin. I can’t thank you enough. You just lifted me out of such a funk.”
When Rae told Dennis about it afterwards, he said he felt the same way. Playing music together again brought him out of his funk. You see, on top of everything else, Dennis’s wife, Beth, had died unexpectedly the day before he came to Hospice. A terrible blow at the most difficult time.
The next day, he told Rae that Beth had come to see him. “She was sitting in that chair right there”, pointing to the armchair by the window. “She said ‘I’ll be seeing you soon.’”
Rae had always had a connection with the spiritual world, ever since he was a little kid. So when Dennis said he saw his wife in the chair, Rae thought: Of course she was there.
After Dennis died, Rae chose to remember him as the strong, funny guy he’d always known. He always kept a sense of humor with Dennis. They always had laughs together. Rae kept him laughing right up to the end.
Recently, Rae came back to visit Hospice. He sat in the lounge, playing some cover tunes. Some Zeppelin. A bit of a crowd gathered and people enjoyed it. It lifted him out of his funk. He thought for a moment that he felt Dennis was there. And Beth. And they were singing along and laughing. Just like in the good old days.