Narrative Care Toolkit

It all began as a simple initiative effort which I started during my freshman year in high school to collect, organize and distribute basic comfort and essential items for 2 different vulnerable groups- hospice patients, their families and caregivers at Capital Caring Health's Adler Center facility and eventually over a year after, to foster children through my ministry service in Mclean Bible Church in Northern Virginia.

One striking moment that I distinctly recall in Adler Center was that of a patient who mustered all the energy within him and got up from his bed as he carefully made his way and asked if he could give me a hug. Being a minor volunteer, I was restricted from having any form of direct patient care or interaction. As the frail old man came close, I was caught unaware, complied to his ask and gave him the Easter basket filled with care items. All he uttered were the words "Thank you," and slowly walked back to his bed. I pondered upon that moment and asked myself with a little bit of regret for never knowing the answers to some questions- "Who could that man be before he was a patient gripped by his terminal illness? What could he truly be thanking me for?" Over sometime, it made me realize that care is not always something that can be placed in a box. While care essentials can offer warmth and a handwritten notecard can offer encouragement, sometimes what a person needs most is to feel that their story still matters - that someone is willing to listen, remember and make space for they are beyond their circumstances or diagnosis.  

That experience and new perspective eventually changed the direction of my project. What used to be a 2 to 3 times a year project over a span of 3 years evolved into something deeper. As I became more interested in this hospice and foster care initiative, I also began exploring how expressing individual experiences and storytelling could become another form of care. I started thinking about the stories people carry: memories they want preserved, people they want remembered, choices they want understood, and questions they may never have had the opportunity to express. The care package became less about what I could give someone and more about how I could help them create space for their voice.

My deep interest in classics unexpectedly gave me a framework for this idea. The ancient texts I had spent years reading were filled with people confronting questions that still feel remarkably contemporary like how do we preserve dignity? What do we owe one another? How do we carry grief, responsibility, identity, and belonging? In Antigone, I encountered the tension between law and moral responsibility. In stories of Odysseus, Aeneas, and other ancient figures, I found characters shaped by displacement, duty, memory, and the search for home. These were not simply stories from the past. They became lenses through which I could think about the stories people live today.

The project evolved into what I call the Narrative Care Toolkit: a collection of prompts, storytelling activities, reflection exercises, and narrative practices designed to help people express experiences that can be difficult to articulate. Classics became not the subject of the toolkit, but one of its foundations—a bridge between ancient questions and contemporary human experiences.

The journey from care packages to narrative care changed my understanding of what it means to help someone make meaning of his experiences during life's transitions. I now ask, “What story deserves to be heard—and what can I create that helps someone tell it?”

The toolkit is my attempt to turn that question into something practical: using the humanities not simply to study human stories, but to help care for the humans who carry them.