Today, I Began Volunteering At A Hospice.

So I Wrote A Letter To Anthony Bourdain About It.

Dear Tony,

Yesterday was dinner 107 of The Last Supper Project. It was on Dutch Liberation Day and in Amsterdam. My host has an artistic practice where she buries herself alive and I thought you would love that. Today, I could hear the sounds of a woman who seemed 80 in considerable pain. She grunted softly when the staff at the hospice adjusted the pillows beneath his veiny neck, and for a moment I imagined you watching from the corner of the hospice room — cigarette in hand, eyebrow arched, mumbling, “There it is. The part no one talks about. Not the food, not the music — just this… the end of the line. And it’s not poetic. It just is. And somehow, that’s enough.”

It was my first day volunteering at a hospice just outside of Amsterdam Centrum. Not a glamorous place — no neon signs or yakitori smoke curling up through alleyways like in your Tokyo episode. Just the smell of antiseptic, soft radio advertisements on loop, and dying people trying to find the right moment to let go. There are a couple Ghanaians here, the cleaner is Dutch and I believe the director is from Indonesia. She’s beautiful. Everyone who works here smiles. I showed up because I wanted to do something for people who I knew could do nothing for me. I feel their helplessness. Or at the very least, try. And even as I navigate the complex end to my own life as a gay undocumented and unwanted immigrant, I hope I can be of value to them.

You once said, “I’m not afraid to look like an idiot.” I’ve carried that like scripture. Because honestly, Tony, I didn’t feel brave today. I felt like someone playing dress-up in the costume of a well-adjusted person. Bipolar disorder has a way of making the world feel like it’s either being swallowed in light or lost in static. Some days I truly want to die just to stop the flickering. But then someone passes me the salt with beaming eyes at a dinner table in Utrecht or see how my best friend looks at her doodle Yuzu and then suddenly I remember what it is to stay.

I started this journey through grief and dinners with strangers — something I called The Last Supper Project — because I wanted to find out what makes people hold on. What makes them let go. The answers have come in chopsticks, butter chicken stew, whispered confessions, and even…Brazilian pudim . I think you would’ve liked that.

Do you remember your Beirut episode from Parts Unknown? The one where the food became background noise and the war came crashing through the lens? That was the first time I realized that storytelling could hold both despair and delight in the same frame. I wanted to do that too — hold contradictions with tenderness.

My second training session towards becoming a death doula is tomorrow. It wasn’t always the plan. But when I met my friend Emmanuel [he’s passing away in less than 90 days by euthanasia ] it his me. Something whispered to my nature that I pieced together from all the parts of me I’d tried to smother or even medicate away. And I might also add that we are deeply encouraged to do volunteer work this way as part of the Going With Grace End of Life Training Program. It’s strange — how caring for the dying has giving me just a little more contempt for the living sometimes. Well…..it’s funny.

I don’t know if you’d have liked me by the way. But I know you’d have understood me. Because beneath the tattoos and the sass, you were just another guy trying to make sense of the hunger and the ache.

Wherever you are, I hope the broth is rich, the table loud, and the company strange in the best way.

I think one of the volunteers is signalling me to help with some cobwebs and so I will have to end it here and put my tea down so I can go help.

Lots of love,
Joseph

my name tag and the information booklet as hospice volunteer taken today.