Here is a revised version of my message to the congregation:
On a Wednesday in May, four years ago, I paused outside my father’s room in the nursing home around eight in the morning to gather myself before stepping in for another day of sitting with him. He was dying, having had a bad seizure a week earlier, common on the late stages of Alzheimer disease.
As I
stood there, the day RN in charge of the floor appeared at my shoulder and
murmured, “It will be soon”
I
took a couple of deep breaths and walked into my father’s room to take up my
spot in a chair next to his bed, holding his hand.
An hour
later, there was a knock on the door and I stepped around the curtain in my
father’s room to find the director of local hospice society standing there. Peter
Marrocco was there to speak to me because this was our first day with a hospice
volunteer coming in to sit with my father that afternoon.
I told him what the nurse had
said and that I had never done anything like this before, been with someone,
watched over someone, as they died
“You
simply can’t be prepared for this,” he said to me. “You just need to listen to
your gut.”
Then he
added, “As far as I’m concerned, this is sacred time.”
Peter
also assured me that my father was better off in his own room at the nursing
home.
“Your
father is surrounded by familiar things,” he said.
And
indeed he was: photographs of his children and grandchildren covered the wall, there
was a stereo for playing his favourite CDs, birds chattered at the feeder
outside the window.
Yet I
think Peter Marrocco perhaps misspoke one thing: You CAN be prepared for this,
for dying. Not only someone else’s but also your own.
This
is what hospice palliative care is all about: transforming what we are scared
of into something that is sacred.
What is palliative care?
Gerry Helm is the chair of the
Cumberland County (NS) Palliative Care Society and she explained it to me this
way: “Palliative care is not about dying, it’s about living until a person
dies.”
The purpose of palliative care is
to think in terms of “whole-person” health care, to relieve suffering and
improve the quality of living and dying. Most people would prefer to die in
their own homes, surrounded by the people and the things that area meaningful
and important to them, and palliative care is the way to ensure.
But consider this statistic: In 2010, more than 252-thousand Canadians died
and 90% of them could have benefited from palliative care – nearly all of them!
Peter Marrocco’s description of
our dying as a sacred time was eye-opening to me, but also life-changing. As
the RN predicted, my father died later that day. As I watched my father’s body
shutting down, and seeing so clearly the division between body and spirit, I
thought to myself, “I will never be afraid of anything ever again.”
Going into his death with a sacred
attitude, not scared, changed the entire experience.
This month’s United Church Observer magazine includes a timely feature article by Trish Elliot about death and dying. Ruth
Richardson, a palliative care nurse in Ottawa, is quoted as saying, “We need to
normalize death and reclaim dying as a special, sacred, wonderful time.”
That’s whole purpose of palliative
care: to address the physical, psychological, social, spiritual as well as
practical issues, as well as all the needs, hopes and fears that that go along
with those. It is done with a team not only of nurses and volunteers but also
with doctors, dieticians, physiotherapists; whatever will allow a person to
live until they die...as fully as they possibly can.
No one wants to talk about death, particularly
their own but you won’t meet a palliative care nurse or volunteer who doesn’t
look at you and say, “We all die. There’s no getting around that.
As Gerry Helm said, “If we talk
about it, we get rid of the fear around it.”
In this way, scared becomes
sacred. It is a gift you can give to yourself, and to your loved ones. A gift
of time and peace and comfort.
I closed my message to the
congregation by reading the final stanza of a poem by Mzwakhe Mbuli:
“Now
is the time,
To
give me roses, not to keep them
For
my grave to come,
Give
them to me while my heart beats,
Give
them today
While
my heart yearns for jubilee,
Now
is the time...”
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