Kirkepiscatoid

That it may please thee to visit the lonely; to strengthen all
who suffer in mind, body, and spirit; and to comfort with thy
presence those who are failing and infirm,
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

I can’t help reading this one and not think of the times I have sat with the dying. Dying is something our culture has screwed up very nicely.

I’m not sure “religion” necessarily helps much, either. I recently read an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association that shows an association with choices of more aggressive end-of-life care associated with people who regularly use prayer and interaction with God. Turns out people who engage in a high degree of "religious coping" with terminal illness are more likely to (surprisingly) choose life-prolonging treatment, including aggressive life-prolonging treatment, and are less likely to choose end of life "comfort measures only". That's a little disconcerting.

The only “hole” I saw in the study on my quick read through it was there was a fairly high number of Roman Catholics in the study, and perhaps recent statements from the Vatican about discontinuing things such as ventilators and feeding tubes and withholding food and water have skewed the results a little.

But if you’ve never sat with the dying, honestly, it’s not so bad, provided one has pain control.

I have been around the dying in pain. That one is pretty rough. But the one thing I have learned from that is “there are things far worse than death.”

But people who are just sort of sliding from this world to the next, there is a quiet and a holiness about it. Yet people are often terribly afraid to watch someone die.

I remember sitting with a friend's husband when he had only a few more days to live. She could not easily find someone to sit with him. I sat with him one night so she could go to her son’s graduation from Joseph Baldwin Academy (A summer program for jr. high aged kids at Truman State). It was actually a very restful evening except for the brief moment he was more lucid and insisted that I call the Vatican and let him talk to the Pope. I found this pretty funny considering he was an atheist. I finally got him to lie back down and rest when I told him, “You know, it’s like 3 a.m. At the Vatican. No one will answer the phone. You’ll have to call in the morning..” To this day, I kind of wonder what he wanted to tell the Pope. But mostly, it was an evening to watch TV and read a book, with the labored noise of his breathing in the background. It seemed odd that his breathing, as “white noise”, was actually a thing that calmed my mind.

I remember one patient I had on clinical rotations at the VA. He wanted to die at home. He was only, at best, a few days from dying. What he wanted more than anything was to go home. His wife pulled us aside and told us, “You have to leave him here at the hospital. I just won’t be able to stand him dying in the house. If he dies in his recliner chair, I’ll have to sell the chair, I won’t be able to stand looking at it. In fact, if he dies in my house, I think I’d have to sell the house.” I was so bewildered by that—that she would thwart his last wish like that.

So, he was left at the hospital to die. His family was too spooked to stay around much. I remember promising him that I would stay with him as much as my duties would allow. I slept by his bed in a chair the night he died. I heard that “white noise” of his breathing. Then I dozed off, and woke up because I no longer heard it. I doubt he had been dead very long.

I sat with my grandmother as she lay dying. I was the one who pronounced her dead, so as not to have to wake up the doctor that the nursing home had on call. I remember how my mom kept going in and out of the room; she could not really bring herself to stay for any great length of time. When Granny died, I remember listening to her chest for a time at least twice as long as I ever did when I was on the floors. It was for the simple reason that I knew if I pronounced her dead and it turned out she wasn’t quite dead, I would never live it down. I could even imagine being haunted by her over it! But she died of her small cell lung cancer, and the last few months had been very hard on her, so I was actually relieved that she passed so easily.

The last few days or hours of an “eventual” death, in the several times I’ve witnessed it, is mostly a gradual entry into a land of shadows. Oddly, it doesn’t scare me but gives me a certain feeling of groundedness. It is still hard for me to make peace with sudden death, violent death, death “before its time.” But a more or less “natural” death is actually an affirming event when you witness it. At least for me, it reminds me of the cycles of the seasons, the stars, the planets. I am still in no hurry to get there. But if this is the type of death that would eventually be mine, I think it would not be so bad.