To the Editor:

Each week, I trade my scrubs for boots. I leave a hospital room where a man takes his last breath, and return to a pasture where lambs are just discovering theirs. These two places — worlds apart in sight and sound — have taught me the same unshakable truth: presence matters more than anything else.

As a cardiac ICU nurse, I’ve witnessed the limits of modern medicine. I’ve watched doctors scramble to reverse the irreversible, as if death itself were a personal failure. We are trained to fight, to intervene, to perform. And sometimes, that’s exactly what’s needed. There is a time to save a life.

But there is also a time to let go — with dignity, love, and presence. The obsession with fixing at all costs often steals from the dying something sacred: their final moments. I’ve seen it in the soft press of a hand, in the quiet exchange of breath and tears. I’ve listened to patients speak their sacred secrets, their regrets, their dying wishes. And not once — not once — has someone told me they wished they’d worked harder or amassed more wealth.

It was always this: “I wish I had more time with the people I loved.”

A mother once sat beside her 28-year-old daughter, riddled with cancer, and said to me through tears, “I just wanted more time with her.”

The great irony is that the one thing no machine can give us — time — is the one thing we most crave when it’s almost gone.

Dr. Gary Chapman’s Five Love Languages — words of affirmation, acts of service, gifts, quality time, and physical touch — are often used to describe how we express care. But presence is the thread that runs through them all. Presence is showing up. It is the language of the soul.

I’ve learned the same lesson outside the hospital, in the quiet of the barn. Old shepherds say, “A healthy sheep is a watched sheep.” And it’s true. A sheep that is observed, tended, known — it thrives. Not because we control it, but because we are with it.

On the farm, presence is subtle: watching the posture of a ewe, the rise and fall of her breathing, the rhythm of a newborn’s nursing. It’s grounding. Honest. It doesn’t ask for perfection, just attention. When I’m in the pasture, I’m not thinking about the outside world. I’m fully there — in rhythm with something ancient and steady.

The contrast between these two worlds — hospital and farm — has taught me that life responds not to domination or distraction, but to witness. To care. To quiet presence.

So turn off the screen. Sit beside someone you love. Put your hands in the dirt. Listen to the stories before they become eulogies. Offer your time, your undivided gaze, your open hand.

Because in the end, no one I’ve cared for has wished for more power, more money, or more hours at work.

It’s always been this:

“I wish I had more time with the people I loved.”

And that time is now.

Emily Vincent

Berne