ALT Dartmouth Health interprofessional Hospice and Palliative Medicine fellows, class of 2022

ALT Volunteers light electronic candles in paper lanterns along a gravel walkway. The sun is setting but there is enough light to see by.

ALT Members of the palliative care stand behind a greeting table, welcoming visitors. The table is covered with electric candles, and behind them stretches the lit pathway, glowing in the darkness.

ALT Luminaries glow with amber light along the pathway. A visitor stands on the path, listening to a volunteer string quartet in the center of the pathway. In the background, the Baker library tower is lit up.

ALT Blessing for a Whole Heart You think if you could just imagine it, that would be a beginning; that if you could envision what it would look like, that would be a step toward a heart made whole. This blessing is for when you cannot imagine. This is for when it is difficult to dream of what could lie beyond the fracture, the rupture, the cleaving through which has come a life you do not recognize as your own. When all that inhabits you feels foreign, your heart made strange and beating a broken and unfamiliar cadence, let there come a word of solace, a voice that speaks into the shattering, reminding you that who you are is here, every shard somehow holding the whole of you that you cannot see but is taking shape even now, piece joining to piece in an ancient, remembered rhythm that bears you not toward restoration, not toward return— as if you could somehow become unchanged— but steadily deeper into the heart of the one who has already dreamed you complete. —Jan Richardson