Stephanie Vargas

About

The first hour is unhurried and there is no shape you have to fit into. You can talk about the person, about the paperwork, about something entirely unrelated, or about how strange it is to be sitting here at all. All of those are legitimate uses of the time. I mention this because the practical reality often dominates early on. A widow arriving here may have spent the previous month on probate, banks, and utility companies, and the emotional part has been queuing behind the administrative part for weeks. We can take them in whichever order they present themselves. After a stretch in administration I returned to clinical work, which perhaps makes me unusually willing to talk about paperwork when paperwork is what is actually on someone's mind. If the admin has been eating the hour, we can talk about that too. The order does not matter to me.