Written by: 🪐 Piper (he/him)

Hospice Isn't Just For The Dying

A re-contextualization of what it means to die and what to do about that


Hi! Welcome to our blog.

This post (Well, essay, really) is going to be long and it's going to be heavy, and honestly, it's probably a questionable decision to make something like this the first post here. But fuck you, this is our website, we can do what we want, etc etc.

More importantly, though- This essay is a breakdown of the fundamental building blocks of what has become our collective core philosophy, and it feels wrong in some way to start a project like a blog without first explaining the lens in which we're writing from and who we are.

At the end of all things it's just a blog. I know. But if I'm going to host a piece of my soul on a website for the entire world to see, I'm going to do it right, okay?

So without further ado:

We are Sterling Manor, and we've only had a pulse since September 23rd, 2024.

We're not actually less than a year old, as you might have been able to gather. At the time of writing, we're 21 going on 22. But I honestly don't have much to say about our life before that day. Will (a member of our lovely fiancee system, or 'fiansys' as we call them) was going through a bunch of old photo albums and stuff with me today, and in turn I pulled out the only thing I could show that was similar- A little collection of pictures from when we were a kid that we have on our iPad, most of them taken by our dad and pre-loaded onto the first cell phone he ever gave us or taken during middle school. And I kinda just had nothing good to say about them like Will did.

Yup, that's me as a kid. That's also me. Jesus, I had eye bags like that at nine? No idea where this picture was taken. There's me eating breakfast, I guess. There's- Oh god do I have a black eye in that picture? Holy shit I was twelve. Okay, enough of that, I guess.

DID system with childhood trauma. Fork in kitchen. It's kind of just the expectation. I don't consider us terribly unique by any metric.

..Not anymore, at least. I thought we were for a long time. But I'll get back to that later, because I need to do a lot of explaining to expand on that one.

This actually starts with a conversation I had with our roommate George that started as him explaining the geology and history of Venice (since the fiansys was on vacation there) and ended with me questioning my entire existence for the rest of the day.

Part 1: It All Just Falls Away

Conversations with George tend to go a lot of places. Like, he also talked about doing drugs I have never even heard of during that conversation. But somewhere between point A and point B he started talking about his experiences working in a care home for the elderly- Specifically, dealing with a lot of end-of-life patients.

This was a branch off discussions of spiritual experiences; He got into how he was caring for a man who was 103 years old and on his last legs, and a neighbor who suggested he ask a spiritual healer for help with a wound on his foot that wouldn't heal.

We're spiritual as all fuck, but I have always found the idea of spiritual healers questionable at best. Something about monetizing the practice and/or telling people you can fix them via the metaphysical just feels.. wrong, to me? So I kinda raised a brow and braced myself to wince at this.

It goes about like this: George asks this spiritual healer for help. She says she'll get in touch with the deities she works with, then later confirms she's done this and says her job is done. George goes back to the man's residence to check on this guy, who had been relatively sedentary the entire time he'd known him, to find him up out of bed far earlier than usual and insisting that he needs to go to church.

As far as George had been told, this guy had never been particularly religious in his life. So he asks him what's up and he says vaguely that he'd had a dream and he just.. needed to go.

So George helps him get to church. He has a pretty good time. In his final days he finds some kind of solace in religion that he didn't have before, just seems far less miserable. And then he's gone.

The takeaway George got from this is that he went to that spiritual healer to try and help this guy with an injured foot, but that wasn't what he actually needed. His body was broken already. Whether or not his foot was injured wasn't going to change that. He didn't have any family or friends he was in contact with and was just generally miserable; He needed something to latch onto, something to feel like he had purpose and something to do, more than anything.

It's here that I start being really autistic about psychology and explain Maslow's hierarchy of needs and my personal criticisms of it to him.

If you're not familiar- It's that needs pyramid everyone makes shitposts about. It's a psychological theory about our basic needs as human beings, and the order of priority they take. It's stacked like this:

The idea is that, while you need all of these to live a fulfilling life and feel secure, you have to fulfill the bottom rung before you can have the motivation or instinct to go to the next one. All the way up to the top.

This was relevant to his story about that old man because it was a perfect example of why I think this theory, while mostly accurate, is flawed.

Have you ever met someone who's clearly fucking going through it and makes the most beautiful art you've ever seen because it's literally all they have to cling onto?

We sure fucking have. Most of our friends for years were people just like us- Chronically online teenagers who were only like that because they were stuck in abusive homes and didn't have many irl friends- If any at all- due to being autistic and queer in a relatively shitty society.

Fact of the matter is, in that kind of situation you're never going to fill most of the bottom tiers. Hell, my system wasn't even getting enough food for most of our life. We were so underfed our eyes were sunken in as a child and we experienced refeeding syndrome when we finally got out of the situation we were living in as an adult. It's often actually impossible to satisfy any tier except the top one when you're being abused; And while it's not a great life to live, clinging onto that can be your lifeline until you can get out. Fill the most psychologically important piece to be able to cope with the lack of the.. well, everything else. For some people it's art. For us it was spirituality. Yknow? You're not done until everything is gone.

I explain this to George and, without skipping a beat, he pulls my little hand-drawn diagram of the hierarchy over to his side of the table and points out how at the end of your life, in his experience, most people tend to lose each rung from the bottom up, the same order they tend to try and fulfill them in.

You become too old and frail to take care of yourself, so you become malnourished and your health declines. As a consequence of this, you are generally moved to a care facility and lose your home. Losing your home causes you to lose your neighbors and familiar community, and in many cases your family distances themselves from you. People have a lower opinion of you as you lose yourself and become senile, and not being able to take care of yourself generally doesn't help the self confidence. It all falls away, and all you have left eventually is trying to find some comforting explanation for what's coming next.

The conversation ended after he said that because he had things to go do. I sat there for a good second just staring at the pencil smudges his finger had made on the diagram while he said this because, probably without intending to in the slightest, in that offhand sentiment he'd managed to liken the end-of-life process to the five years of our life leading up to September 23rd, 2024.

Part 2: The Death of Sterling Manor

There's a lot of traumadumping in this section. I feel all the details shared here are important to the point I ultimately want to make, but you can skip ahead to the next section if you don't think you can stomach all that.

2019 was objectively the best year of our life until 2024.

It sucked. A lot. We were still living with our physically and emotionally abusive shithead of a dad and a different family member we cared about a lot almost died, but we had a lot going for us anyway. We had a small, but close knit friend group at school (and generally weren't bullied anymore), we came out as trans over the summer and everyone around us was relatively accepting, and a few months after that we had our syscovery and started being open about being a system. We had good grades in school and were well liked by the staff. We had a fantastic partner who we'd been dating for an entire year by this point. (Not the same one we have today, but it ended on good terms!)

You're probably expecting the next line of this to be 'then the pandemic happened', but honestly, I think we would have been fine if that was the only thing that happened in 2020. We were pretty used to being stuck at home on the internet a lot.

What actually happened that year that started the downward spiral was that we lost four family members back to back.

The first one wasn't a death, it was cutting off our abusive older sibling. Which was a choice we made, but there are still little words I can put to accurately describe that kind of grief unless you've experienced it yourself. Then a few months later our great grandma died, and she was the family member we were the closest with out of anyone. Then two other family members died. We basically lost one family member every 2-3 months for the entire year, and none of them were even due to COVID. Which sucked.

Our grades at school suffered. We pleaded with staff to help and have mercy on us considering what was going on in our life. We struggled with self care to the point of becoming so disheveled our teachers started expressing concern.

We ended up attempting suicide January 3rd, 2021 (And by that I mean someone in here tried to overdose and another person wrenched front away from them and marched us to the hospital). Our dad got an email while we were in the ward from our school guidance counselor basically saying "suck it up and do your homework, everyone loses their grandparents"- Our dad was fucking awful at being empathetic towards us and even he was appalled by that response. We ended up dropping out of school the second we read that email upon discharge because.. Yeah. Fuck that. That's a you're on your own, kid if we've ever seen one.

We physically survived that attempt, but what we lost from it ultimately left a wound that went psychologically septic. It led to what I consider to be our very slow, very painful death.

Dropping out of school lost us the only in-person social network we had. Nobody kept in contact with us.

This plus how generally destabilized we were from.. being in an actively abusive situation, having a bunch of people die, etc lost us a lot of friends online, too. It was a mix of people not being willing to understand the situation we were in and us taking the situation we were in out on others- Look. We were an asshole. I don't beat myself up over it anymore because I know what hell we were going through to get there. I can hold that sentiment and the one that people in general are fucking awful to trauma survivors and unfairly beat them up for being unstable simultaneously.

Over years the scope whittled down more and more. Our family gradually phased themselves out of our dad's life because he was an insufferable prick, and by extension they were gone from our life too. At some point our dad decided to randomly chase a girl that he decided within a year was 'the love of his life' to El Salvador and get scammed by her (I am not fucking joking), and in the process we lost 95% of our life's possessions because you can only bring so much stuff with you when you move to another country and back on a budget. Upon return to the states our dad was financially broken from all that and never recovered, and also gained some pretty expensive habits to cope, which he decided were more important than feeding us (Or himself). So we started eating less and less. We tried to get a job to feed ourselves, but couldn't hold it down for long because of the.. everything else. Which made the rest of our physical health worse as an already chronically ill person, and we ended up basically bedridden as things declined. We became too ill to even pursue most of our hobbies.

Eventually all we were left with was a newfound interest in exploring spiritual things and a small closed online friend group who, in hindsight, saw us moreso like a traumatized zoo animal to watch like a soap opera than a friend?

We tried over and over again to find a way to escape and were met with several dead ends. Multiple people who offered a way out and then rescinded the offer last minute or straight up ghosted us. We had the financial means to get out secured that entire time thanks to a very generous friend who offered to get us a plane ticket if we found a place, we literally just had nowhere to go. For years. It was so incredibly.. demoralizing.

At some point we just kind of accepted that we were probably going to just die there and tried our best via a mix of spiritual exploration, vent art, and spending time over text with the few friends and partner system who actually tried to connect with us to find a way to come to peace with that.

The real nail in the coffin, though, was when our dad finally took us to a doctor in June 2024 and they immediately found fucking tumors in our liver. Four of them. And our liver enzyme levels were fucked and our liver was enlarged. And we underwent a month and a half of medical testing because they had no idea whether or not it was cancer.

Like. Holy fucking shit. It turned out to be a benign condition called Focal Nodular Hyperplasia, but imagine being that fucking done with life and hopeless and then being told you might have cancer.

We pretty much immediately started making end-of-life plans. Reaching out to people to make amends, trying to figure out what we wanted to happen to all of our accounts and the few things we owned, that type of thing. Started lashing out a bunch at our dad too. Several of our 'friends' got on our ass for acting like we were going to die when we hadn't even gotten medical confirmation of what the tumors were (Which was fucked, honestly. They're tumors. That would scare anyone shitless.) We cut them all off and generally just let ourselves spiral down the fucking drain. It was.. bad.

Somewhere into the testing process we got an indication that things might be benign but still needed further imaging and we honestly felt.. disappointed by it. Insisted to ourselves that no, it had to be cancer. Because to us there were only two options: Get cancer and finally catch a break from the sympathy it would warrant or die, or keep living this miserable fucking life.

In hindsight, the end-of-life plans weren't really about the potential cancer. If we didn't have cancer after all, we were going to kill ourselves. We didn't consciously think that (most of the time, anyway), but deep down, we knew that's where that was heading.

From a fundamental standpoint, we were already dead and buried. We had no life and certainly nothing to live for. Nobody was coming to help us. We knew with every fiber of our being that it was over, we were walking around aimlessly without a pulse just waiting to finally collapse and.. rest.

Part 3: An Ex-Corpse's Field Guide To Necromancy (And Why Everyone Should Learn It)

So what exactly happened September 23rd, 2024? When did we take our first breath?

Well. The full story behind this, I feel, warrants an entire blog post on its own with a different life lesson to focus on. But long story short: We got engaged. This was a pretty big thing, because our fiansys lives in a different country than us, so an agreement to get married meant we actually had an avenue to go somewhere, because then we could live with them.

Part of this was that we would go visit them for as long as we were allowed on a tourist visa (three months) to see if we were compatible to live together long term. Then we would start figuring out what happens next and how to achieve that.

September 23rd was the day we flew out for that first visit.

Booking that plane ticket was basically signing the contract for our new lease on life.

I thought we were unique for a long time because of how.. horrific our circumstances were. How hopeless they were. How even other people in awful situations eventually deemed us 'too much'. ..It was actually Will who pointed out that this is survivorship bias.

We almost became part of a statistic. Mentally ill abuse survivors trapped and left in the dust by society who eventually kill themselves. He pointed out the uptick in suicide during the pandemic to make his point. The only 'exceptional' bit about our experience is that we survived that kind of bullshit for that long and made it out the other side. And we're not alone in that either, but there's.. noticeably less of us.

Instead we came back to life and got a.. will to live again. And through this we got a more permanent place to stay until we get married, because another friend saw how we thrived when we got even a few months' respite and knew that we would be fine to take in and wouldn't end up hurting them.

We got kindness and got kinder in turn. And that simple cycle is what changed everything.

So here's how to do necromancy if you happen to be friends with a corpse: Kindness and mutual aid. That's it. That's literally fucking it.

And as far as mutual aid goes- It isn't just money. We couldn't do shit with just money. One person alone can't offer a whole bunch- But a group of people is an entirely different story. If a few people can offer emotional support, a few people can offer money, one person can offer a place to stay, another can offer transport.. Maybe there's someone in driving distance that can help bring meals, maybe there's people with ins to certain job industries or relevant knowledge to help find jobs, housing, or schooling, maybe there's people willing to offer a couch for temporary visits to give someone room to breathe.. Suddenly you can get a whole lot more done.

It was ultimately the efforts of a small group of people that helped us survive and got us the fuck out.

So get creative. The ways you might be able to help might not be what's directly in front of you. Assess your skills and what you can offer. Paired with others' help, you might surprise yourself.

But not everybody can do necromancy. So what do you do, if not raise the dead?

Part 4: Social Hospice

What I really want to impart is that death isn't just when you stop breathing, and that it isn't always something that's permanent.

So many people refuse to be sympathetic to visibly mentally ill people until they kill themselves and it's too late, and frankly, all of you fuckers need a reality check.

Half of the time you deem someone too ill to be redeemed you're already looking at a corpse. Dead. Buried. Gone. They're still walking, they're still talking, but there's no life behind those eyes. They don't do anything worthwhile with their lives because they can't. Abuse sucks all the life out of them and leaves little room for much else.

You cannot look at that and call it being alive.

Again- not everybody can do necromancy, and that's okay. You don't need to do necromancy to make the world a better place. But what you can do is something I for the sake of this essay's theming am going to call social hospice.

The entire idea of hospice is care for an ill individual focused on reducing their pain rather than saving them, because you can't save them.

When someone is in emotional pain: Be kind. Literally just be fucking kind. Holy shit guys BE KIND TO PEOPLE TRAPPED IN ABUSIVE SITUATIONS. FUCK.

Don't expect your friend in an abusive situation to be perfect. Expect them to get ugly. Don't accept outright abuse, but.. you do have to be more lenient if you want to be friends with someone already backed into a corner. They might snap. They might get scared and try to run. They might do things that annoy you, or have opinions that aren't palatable to your tastes. They might be too tired to respond to you every day. They might not have energy to do much more than chat, or might only have energy for activities that interest them and not what you want to do. Just.. be patient. Fuck. Back away and calm down for a bit if you need to. Give them room to breathe. It distresses me how many clear abuse victims I see who get entire callout posts made on them for being visibly ill, or lose all their friends, or yknow. You have no idea how much even a taste of unconditional love can change someone.

You would think all this would be obvious. But in our experience.. No, it's really not. We have had people berate us for not having the energy to watch movies or play video games with them while we're on our last legs both physically and mentally, because it would be months of this. We have had people berate us for being ill in all the ugly ways- Self harming, fighting back against our abusers in an ugly way, all of it.

Genuinely. I do not give a fuck how you feel about an abuse victim's reaction to being abused. If you shame someone for it you are part of the problem and perpetuating the cycle even further.

Just.. Try to see that pain first before the ugliness. You have no idea how much it can help.

And to those reading this that fear they may have died- I'm not going to tell you that it gets better, because we didn't believe it when we were dead either. You fundamentally cannot. I get it.

I hope it at least helps to consider it this way. That death isn't the end. You're faffing about aimlessly and every movement comes with the effort of wading through tar, and it hurts, and it's.. exhausting. I know.

You're not weak or lazy for not being able to handle it. Do you know how strong you have to be to keep moving a body that no longer has a beating heart or flowing blood? You're still here. And sometimes that's all you can really hold onto. And that's okay. I know it being okay doesn't really help, but.. Try to be proud of yourself, if anything else. It can do a lot.

Part 5: A Second Chance

We died a long time ago, and we're once more alive. And honestly, our life is pretty great these days. We have a wonderful fiansys, a close friend circle who are family to us, and we feel.. safe. We feel. All of our needs are met and we're not afraid anymore. And holy fuck has it changed everything.

So that's the core of this blog. And honestly everything we create these days. To explore, express, and impose the fact that we got a second chance at life and we are taking advantage of it to the fullest extent we can.

I fundamentally do not believe that we are the same person we were back then. This is a reincarnation. Getting a second chance has changed us. The Sterling Manor from back then is dead, and honestly.. good riddance.

All of these posts are going to be little pieces of who we are now, and how we've been changed. And I doubt many people are even going to see this blog at all, but I still think putting all this out there is worth something.