Eleven Rooms

Miriam Chen visits the future site of Orchard House Hospice, a former apple orchard east of Bend, and begins asking the first question she always asks: where does the light go.

Miriam visits her mother Lin in Room 6 of Evergreen House, the hospice facility Miriam designed seven years ago in Portland.

Miriam writes the architectural program for Orchard House, the document that defines what the building must do before the design begins.

Sage Hill, 2004. Miriam's first hospice design, where a dying man named Walter taught her that ceilings should be sky.

The afternoon in Dr. Shapiro's office when the words entered the room and changed everything except the things that could not be changed.

Miriam reviews the blueprints of her ten previous hospice designs, reading them the way a writer reads their earlier books.

David Chen visits Lin in Room 6, bringing a library book she can no longer read, and reads aloud to her the way he has read to her for fifty-four years.

Lin's forty years at the Multnomah County Library, where the Dewey Decimal System was a theology and everything had a place, and now she is living in the category she catalogued.

Miriam designs the corridors of Orchard House -- twelve feet wide, gently curving, the passages between the rooms that are themselves a kind of room.

Miriam and James select the materials for Orchard House, choosing real things for the dying because the dying deserve real things.

Miriam's ex-husband Paul, a tax attorney who needed to live with someone who designed for the living, and the divorce that was quiet, like a well-designed hospice.

Miriam designs the central garden at Orchard House, the courtyard where the surviving apple trees from the old orchard will stand among the new ones, the room without a ceiling, the room whose walls are the building and whose floor is the earth.

Miriam designs the Orchard House kitchen as a kitchen, not a cafeteria, because the smell of food is the smell of home and dying people deserve the smell of home.

Thea's ten years in hospice nursing, reading patients not by their charts but by their hands and the way they hold their blankets, the building's user, the test case, the person who lives inside the architecture the architect imagined.

The building at night, the amber LEDs and the quiet rounds and the threshold state, the architecture of the hours when the dying do their deepest work.

Miriam designs the patient room windows for Orchard House while at Evergreen House the morning light falls on Lin and the meeting of light and person becomes the thing Miriam has designed ten buildings toward.

The first week of December, when the building in Bend nears completion and the body in Portland nears its limit, and the architect moves between the two convergences like light between two windows.

Miriam finds letters in Lin's house -- fifty-four years of a marriage written on paper, the ordinary daily accumulation of two lives -- and reads them to Lin, who remembers some.

Lin's last Thanksgiving, as the family gathers in Room 6 and the room holds more than its program anticipated.

Miriam designs the eleventh patient room at Orchard House with special attention, and the designing becomes a prayer she does not recognize as a prayer.

Miriam's cousin Wei visits Lin, and in the cafeteria he and Miriam talk about buildings and bridges and the question of how a structure carries the weight.

David finishes reading The Pillow Book to Lin, and the finishing is the thing, the last page turned, the last sentence spoken into the air of Room 6.

The last night, the hours between the last page and the last breath, when David and Miriam sit on either side of the bed and the room does the only thing left to do, which is hold.

The day after Lin dies, Room 6 is empty, the bed stripped, the window clean, the room ready for the next person, and Miriam sits in David's chair and sees the light.