Why this 19-year-old Hopkins student helps record the dying’s last words

As Michael Mason lay dying last fall, he began to tell a stranger about his life.

“I took off wrong,” he said. “This way — wrong; that way — wrong.“

With every chance he’d taken, Mason said, he believed he had accomplished nothing. But as he kept talking, he remembered his life’s more meaningful moments.

“They brag about my cooking, though it was just chicken and eggs,” he said of time with his nieces and nephews. “They love my pancakes. And that’s pretty much what they got every time my sister left me to babysit them.”

Those final conversations with a hospice volunteer about Mason’s life before he died in November were compiled and turned into a 6,000-word “Legacy Letter” from the 54-year-old to his relatives and friends.

It wasn’t happenstance but a coordinated effort to record Mason’s thoughts, memories and history by a volunteer willing to put it in writing.

The idea came in 2024 from a Johns Hopkins University student, who founded a nonprofit known as Letters Without Limits with a friend at Brown University. Since then, the pair have been enlisting more volunteer interviewers at hospices around the country.

“Rough as it can be for hospice patients, their lives have meaning and purpose,” said Omkar Katkade, the 19-year-old co-founder who said he got the idea while volunteering with hospice patients near his hometown outside Philadelphia.

“They have so much to say and share.”

The idea of capturing the words of the dying isn’t new, and there are other models available to help people talk with the dying. Katkade leaned on what’s known as dignity therapy for a set of questions to get fellow volunteer interviewers going. But his service is free and relies largely on fellow college students, especially pre-med students like Katkade.

Since the fall, the program has shared some letters publicly in hopes these “mini biographies” would resonate more broadly.

“These stories,” he said, “deserve to be in the spotlight.”

Sometimes conversations happen over hours, and often, over days. The words can flow or require prodding. But volunteers say everyone eventually offers stories about their lives.

Letters take different forms. They may be transcribed interviews or summarized. But typically, they include the patient’s own words with an introduction by the volunteers. When the patients agree, they are posted on the Letters Without Limits website and Instagram.

For Katkade, it’s a personal mission. He believes talking with the dying will give future doctors like him a broader perspective. It also serves as a reminder to health care providers, he said, that patients are more than the sum of their end-of-life illnesses and need to express important thoughts and wishes about their care.

While many volunteers are students, Vicky Meehan isn’t.

The 71-year-old hospice volunteer in St. Louis heard about the letters program and said she fell naturally into the process after a career filled with writing and editing. It now feels like a calling, she said, to shepherd stories like Mason’s.

Mason initially didn’t think he had something to offer. The man from St. Louis had no children of his own and, he told Meehan, he didn’t always make good decisions.

That didn’t deter Meehan, who kept him talking into her recorder as the pair grew from strangers into friends.

In her introduction to Mason’s final letter, Meehan said he had a “gentle and sincere nature.” He remained positive, she wrote, and “determined to find the best in each and every day.”

While Mason didn’t have a steady career, he relayed to Meehan that his work with a church friend distributing furniture to people in need was his favorite job. Mason also felt a sense of duty in caring for his aging mother.

Meehan said the letter will serve as a reminder of good times now that he’s gone, as well as a family history for future generations. Contained inside the letter, she said, were important life lessons from Mason — be kind, support others and let things go.

“I got a draft and looked at it with him, and he made suggestions of things to add and remove,” said Meehan, adding that Mason, who was in hospice after a long illness, died within weeks of finishing the project. Mason’s family agreed to the letter’s public posting.

A committee of palliative care and ethics experts also takes a look at such letters before publication to ensure the delicate messages adhere to standards and respect privacy.

Dr. Jennifer Eitingon is a palliative care and hospice physician who serves on a committee helping Katkade ensure that the letters are presented in an ethical way. She also connected him with the volunteers at a local hospice.

She recalled many stories from her own patients, some married for 50 or 60 years, and their thoughts on making the unions last. She said she knows their families would want to hear about them.

But she said doctors caring for patients at the end of their lives can’t always spend the time they want with every patient just talking. The letters project, she said, lends an extra ear.

“It gives people joy and fulfillment and creates a legacy,” Eitingon said.

“When I heard about the project, I was stoked. I knew it would be so meaningful for patients, but also volunteers and families,” she said. “I know it fills my cup.”

After Mason died, Meehan was able to present his letter to Edris Griffin, Mason’s sister and the mother of his nieces and nephews. She said she had eight children, but four died in an accident. The survivors, now in their 30s, will have the letter to help them remember their uncle and their siblings.

“Some days, even now, I’ll be sad and think, ‘Let me call Michael,’” Griffin said. “I forget he’s gone.”

She can turn to the letter for support, she said. “They made that happen for us. It’s really important. It’s what you need.”