Marta Sandoval

I started the sitting rota because we were becoming an institution for people who liked reading. Nothing wrong with reading. But we had a room full of people discussing attention and a county with nobody to sit with the dying, and I could not get the two facts to be in the same room without something being done about it.

Eleanor thought it was a distraction at first. She said so plainly, which is one of the good things about her, and she changed her mind within a year, which is the other one. She never said she had changed her mind. She simply took a Tuesday.

The founders were wrong about a great deal. They were wrong about children — Eleanor thought the whole question of children could be left to sort itself out and it did not, it took a memorandum and fifteen years of argument. They were wrong about money, they thought talking about it was vulgar, and we nearly lost the hall for that.

I have had one very good life, and about a third of it was in that building, and I would like the recording to say that I do not think the building is important. It is a hall in Maine with a floor that slopes. What is important is that somebody is sitting with Mrs Kelleher tonight, and somebody is, and it is Tuesday, so I know who.