According to Corant.com Leila B.'s mother played the piano all day and all night, so much that her children would, as lovingly as they could, ask her to give it a rest once in a while.

But Leila B.'s mother would not stop, and her music swept up the whole family. Leila herself grew up to sing at church. She sang soprano to Sister Maddie Eva's alto. A poem about her life — with an accompanying photo of Leila B. in a stunning hat — is part of a traveling hospice art exhibit at the main rotunda of St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center in Hartford.

The exhibit includes 40-some pieces — including poems, photographs, mosaics and paintings — in "Completing the Journey: The Art of Hospice," a show of work by, for and about hospice patients, with the help of Connecticut VNA and Connecticut VNA Partners staff.

Members of the VNA complementary therapy team — artists, musicians, massage therapists — work with hospice patients to tell their life stories through art, or to encourage them to say that one thing they want to say. The group is led by Susan E. Rosano.

"When people are in the process of dying, they are more real," said Rosano, whose speciality is mosaics. "They are who they are. It's easier for them to talk about how much they loved their children or where they met their wife and what that meant."

Last week, while Rosano and colleague Alison Ives were hanging the work, Rosano said she'd just come from meeting a man who said "uncommonly beautiful things" about his daughter. They are creating a project together.

Ives, who sang at the show's opening on Monday, said she was moved to write poetry after listening to her clients' stories. She had stopped for years, but the lyricism and the power of those stories moved her.

The art is reflective of hospice's attitude, said Dr. Roy Zagieboylo, hospice medical director.

"There's living to be done yet," he said at the opening. "Hope isn't gone. There has to be the hope of other things than living forever."

One photo shows a close-up of an elderly, short-haired woman on a massage table. She was a Cambodian Buddhist monk who spoke no English, said Rosano, and the look on her face at the hands of her massage therapist is peaceful and priceless.