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There’s a moment in every traveler’s life when the trips stop.
Nobody announces it. There’s no farewell tour, no final boarding call. One day you’re the person with the suitcase, and then, quietly, you’re the person with the photo albums.
For Larry Dureault, an Army veteran living on the hospice unit at the VA’s Brockton campus in Massachusetts, that moment should have been long past. He’s the kind of man whose traveling days sound finished on paper: he can’t leave the unit, and his wife, who has Alzheimer’s, lives in a nursing home across town.
And then, one morning in January, a nurse handed him a brochure and asked him where in the world he’d like to go.
The Man Who Chose Spain
Larry served from 1969 to 1973. He started as a stevedore — the Army now calls it a “marine cargo specialist,” which is military-speak for the guy who loads the ships — and later became a military police officer. He grew up in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and if you get him talking, he’ll tell you about the bike trails there. The long routes. The beautiful ones. The rides that meant something.
That morning, Larry became the first veteran to try a new virtual reality program on the Brockton hospice unit, a pilot the VA wrote about in one of the loveliest stories we’ve read this year.
If “virtual reality” sounds intimidating, here’s all it is: a headset that looks like ski goggles. You put it on, and instead of the ceiling of your room, you see somewhere else — all around you, in every direction, like you’re standing in it.
The nurses helped him get the headset settled. One held up the brochure of destinations. Another adjusted the picture until it was sharp.
Larry picked Spain.
Eight Out of Ten
The staff watched along on a tablet as Larry turned his head slowly, taking it all in. At one point he spotted a dog in the distance — and possibly a horse, which apparently caused some delighted debate in the room.
When the session ended, Larry delivered his review: “It was pretty cool!”
Asked to rate the experience, he gave it an enthusiastic eight out of ten.
We’d like to pause and appreciate that score. This is a man who just traveled to Spain from a hospital bed in Brockton, and he still docked it two points. Larry is not handing out participation trophies. Larry is an honest reviewer, and we respect him enormously for it.
His final verdict: “I’d recommend it to other Veterans.”
This Isn’t Just One Nice Morning
Here’s what makes this bigger than one good day in Brockton.
The VA has been studying this. A study published this year followed 25 veterans receiving hospice and palliative care who tried virtual reality. Ninety-one percent enjoyed it. Ninety percent wanted to do it again.
The most requested experiences weren’t games or gimmicks — they were travel. Places they’d been. Places they’d always meant to go.
The study’s title comes from something one of those veterans said afterward: “I don’t get to feel this good very often.”
Read that one more time. Then try to argue this is just a toy.
Why It Matters
We spend a lot of time in this newsletter talking about technology that wants something from you — your password, your credit card, your attention. It’s nice, every so often, to talk about technology that just wants to hand you a window.
Because that’s all this is. Not a cure. Not a replacement for the bike trails of Rhode Island. A window — opened for a man in a room that doesn’t have enough of them.
Larry gave Spain an eight out of ten.
The morning gave him something no score can quite capture.
