Through the Valley of the Shadow
- Michelle Wood: SWCD
- January 25, 2010
- 806
I had the privilege of being with two older persons recently who were very near death. (In the first case, she passed away just four hours after my brief visit.) I will not share many details, because their stories are not mine to tell, but wanted to use this opportunity to encourage anyone in this situation not to shy away from being near loved ones nearing death.
Everyone is different about what they want at this stage of life. The first person expressed the desire not to be alone when the time came. Her son, a member of our church, also expressed the desire for accompaniment by friends—his family members were thousands of miles away. Daughters had visited earlier at various points when doctors and hospice care workers had predicted the end was near. So members of our church were called upon to sit with Mark and his mother.
To choose to have friends present for such an experience is to choose vulnerability and comfortableness with oneself at the end of life. Your hair is going to look a mess. Your mouth may gape, eyes flutter and roll, fetid breath can be present. You are by turns too hot, too cold, so a nightie or hospital gown barely keeps you modest. If the person is in pain, that is sometimes uncomfortable and distressing to witness.
Yet this woman, in her 80s, made real efforts to converse with her visitors, smile, and reach out her own hands to hold ours. Her hands were warm. Her state was up and down the last two days, different visitors observing different levels of response and efforts at conversation. So when Mark called to say “It’s over” just hours after I’d stopped by, I was taken a bit by surprise. But then I felt profound gratefulness that their six-month struggle was finally done.
Of course I thought back to my own father’s death, four years ago this spring. He had been hospitalized, then entered nursing care for one week. All of us children had visited, said our goodbyes, prayed with Dad. Siblings had to return home, scattered to three states. Mom and my nearby sister visited frequently, but when Dad finally died on a Sunday morning, it was after Mom had slipped out for just an hour to attend worship services at the nursing home. Why had he died then, none of us present? I felt a little cheated: for Mom, for us all.
But another dear friend helped me connect the dots when her brother died recently. My friend, Martha, herself in her 70s, cared for her brother, Tommy, for three years after he experienced a stroke. Tommy’s wife, incapacitated, was unable to care for him. But Martha is a trouper, with many years of experience caring for elderly persons in her home as a job and a calling. An LPN by training, she took care of her own parents, and over the years tended to enough elderly and dying that she says the local funeral homes learned just how to get a body down her difficult front steps.
Tommy struggled for months, some days being very near death; on other days he was well enough to take short excursions—on a picnic, to our home. On the evening we visited, shortly before Christmas, Martha was almost certain he’d be called “home” that night: the doctor (who still makes house calls) said he either had pneumonia or the death rattle, perhaps elements of each in different lungs. Still, he survived that night. But I wasn’t surprised a week later when Martha called to say he’d finally gone home. She was sorrowful but wanted to share how it happened. She had asked her husband to go bring Tommy’s wife to see him on that last day. Martha was convinced that the visit from his much-loved wife, though difficult, was the “permission” that her brother needed to finally let go and go home to heaven. He died that night.
Thinking about Martha’s experience with her brother, I suddenly remembered how my father had felt much remorse over the death of his own father because of the way Grandpa (Dad’s dad) died. Grandpa (95) lived with us and Dad took care of him to the end, with Grandpa literally dying in his arms from choking. Dad was trying to help him, but the choking episode stopped his breath and his frail heart. Dad often expressed regret that he was not able to help him, and he was afraid that Grandpa died struggling. We tried to convince him that Grandpa knew Dad was trying to help him.
Could it have been that somewhere deep in his subconscious my dad wanted to save my mom and us kids from ever wondering such a thing—and let go when everyone was safely away. Skeptics would say it happens when it happens and we’ll never know. But somehow that thought helped me feel it was okay that we weren’t with Dad when he died.
But don’t be afraid to be with those who want and need someone standing or sitting nearby. Dr. Ira Byock, who has written much on this subject, said, “I’m not wanting to romanticize or glorify dying. It is a hard, unwanted, sad, often tragic time of life; but in addition to all that, it is also very often an extremely important, precious, poignant time in the lives of individuals and families.”
For more from Dr. Byock, you can visit two Web sites, www.EmbracingAging.com or www.JourneyTowardForgiveness.com. Or send your thoughts to melodied@ThirdWayMedia.org (Include the name of your paper in your response.)
You can also visit Another Way on the Web at www.thirdway.com.
Melodie Davis is the author of seven books and has written Another Way since 1987. She and her husband have three adult daughters.