It was a quiet Tuesday afternoon when the call came in. His voice was fragile, almost breaking, as we went through the usual questions, availability, price, the kind of massage he wanted. Then he asked something that made me set the phone down and just breathe:

“Would it be possible to have someone play violin during the session?”

In five years of this work, I’ve heard requests that made me laugh, blush, and occasionally scratch my head, but never one like this. This wasn’t about indulgence. This was about grief, about saying goodbye, about weaving love and loss into one last ritual of touch.

Sometimes the requests that sound strange at first are really just someone’s heart, desperate to be heard.