SURPRISES IN WHAT APPEARS TO BE A WASTELAND
During the six years we lived outside
But this day was different. The cloudbursts of the week before had firmed the soil and made for easier walking. Parking our van on the edge of the road, the two of us, and our canine companion, quickly negotiated several flat acres of desert, covered with the usual creosote bushes and low desert holly, and suddenly came upon an unexpected deep gully or ravine. There, in the lowest spot, the bushes turned out to be athol trees of good size and there was water aplenty nearby and grass at their bases. Surprise, surprise, -- a wet-land in the desert! As if to herald our arrival at the scene, three egrets mounted skyward, sorry perhaps, that we had discovered their secret resting-place.
Mounting an abandoned railroad rise, we could spy a mining area also not visible from the highway and we checked that out after a brief walk eastward. En route we came across what my college geography teacher used to call “a specimen of autocarcansis,” – an old, rusty car in pieces. As well there were pieces of lumber, concrete, metal and clay pipe. Obviously the area had once seen considerable human activity! But, “Who knew?”
On the return jaunt back to our vehicle, we were silent, the dog walking slowly between us. It occurred to me how much our morning hike had been something of a metaphor for entering and traversing the space where people are facing their certain mortality and living out their end-time. For fifteen years when we had lived in the East we volunteered in a local hospice and in the palliative care services offered by two hospitals. I was a palliative care volunteer then, and my assignment was to visit in hospital with persons approaching their deaths. In a sense, I walked with them to the edge of their lives, and sometimes I was the one who bid them farewell as they left this world.
Some, maybe most people, naturally regard the certain interval before death as “a wasteland, a desert,” -- what can that time and space offer one, but sadness and awareness of losses? Well, just as we found during the morning walk, when you venture to journey with dying persons, you can be surprised by unexpected beauty and signs of great lovingness still at work in the universe. I know this for certain, because “I’ve been there, and I’ve seen that!”
Six months after my own radiation treatment for breast cancer, the palliative care coordinator at the big general hospital asked me if I wanted to take on a special assignment, that of reading to a restless woman patient who found the evenings particularly difficult. Her family lived about fifty miles distant. That is how I met Anne, and how she and I made our way across the last six weeks of her life, and found a grace and beauty that neither of us anticipated!
It was early April when I first came to read to Anne. Normally a lot of “small talk” might have taken place prior to the discussion of what books she wanted read to her each evening. We dispensed with the polite chit-chat and she informed me she already had at her bedside some Pearl Buck novels one of her daughters had picked up in a used book store. Only telling her that I, too, really enjoyed Buck’s novels, our first evening together began. I read for two hours, she began to relax quite visibly, and the nurse came in at ten to deliver the nightly “meds.”
Occasionally Anne stopped my reading and we discussed some situation in the book. Gradually she cut short the periods of reading aloud and began to tell me about herself, and ask me about my life. She had grown daughters, as I did, likewise a son, and we discovered we were about the same age. Somehow it comforted her to know I was surviving my recent breast cancer surgery and radiation treatment. She knew I understood completely what it was like to contend with cancer, but in her case, the lung tumor was inoperable. We never discussed her devastating prognosis – a very few months at the most, and at the end, perhaps hemorrhage.
Each night, after the “meds,” Anne asked me “to tuck her
in,” sit close to her bed holding her hand until she went to sleep. I never left the hospital till the shift
change at eleven p.m. Sometime during
those six weeks she let me know she wanted to be kissed good-night as she and I
had kissed our children good-night.
Simultaneously I began to say a little mantra to her, a portion of which
I had read about in a beautiful book by author Deborah Duda. It begins, “Put your hand in the hand of God…..”. Anne and I both remembered
“Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God –
That shall be to you better than a light and safer than a known way.”
I think I missed but one night of visiting during the month and a half. I had to pick up my son and his gear from University, and the journey to get him took six hours each way. Anne forgot I had told her I wouldn’t be coming in that one night, and the nurses told me she had endured a difficult night. Another night I was awakened at four a.m. by the palliative care doctor who said Anne was having a breathing crisis and, “Would you come be here with her?” When I arrived at hospital, the doctor, several residents and nurses were around her bed. She had a mask on and when she spoke, “Oh, you’re here now,” the gasses she was receiving made her sound like Donald Duck. We all laughed, Anne included. I stayed a few hours, till she was resting comfortably again.
One night Anne told me another palliative care doctor had been to see her and she was going to be moved to a different hospital, a chronic care facility with a special palliative care unit. I spoke to the new doctor, a good friend of mine, and he told me that I should introduce myself to the nurses of that unit, and that I would be welcome to continue our reading and visiting regimen as before. We had already completed two Pearl Buck novels and I had begun reading Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona. After Anne’s move, I spent the next two evenings finishing the last chapters.
Then it was Sunday and Mothers’s Day too. I had just returned from church and was serving lunch to guests. The phone rang and the head palliative care nurse urged, “You better get over here right away. Anne’s been asking for you.” I asked the nurse, “Has Anne’s condition deteriorated, is she close to death?” The answer was negative. When I arrived, Anne was sitting upright in what is called a Broda chair. She got right to the point. “I want you to ask Jesus for me to die right now!” Perhaps having been moved to new quarters had brought home to Anne the full realization of her certain and impending death. I assured her I could not make that request of the Divine, but I told her that, “If you are really sure about this, -- that you want to die soon, -- I think your body will get the message and begin to shut down.” (Several times before I had witnessed the phenomenon of a patient’s stated conscious determination to die, and the onset of death within hours.) I promised her that we would call her family and that I would stay with her “to the very end.”
We spent the remainder of the afternoon with Anne voicing her concerns on leaving her family, as we awaited their arrival. Mid-afternoon I walked with her to the bathroom, holding the long hose to her oxygen unit, but she walked on her own power. About five-thirty, I helped feed her orange sherbet, which she thoroughly enjoyed. Her family would arrive soon, so I told her I was going home to eat supper and rest a bit. I would be back in a couple of hours. I thought there would be a long night ahead. Two hours later I returned to the hospital and was met in the parking lot by the attending physician, who told me Anne had lapsed into unconsciousness, still sitting in her chair, her daughters at her side.
The daughters greeted me saying, “Mom’s unconscious, but we told her everything would be okay. It was all right to go. Can she hear us, do you think?” I assured them I was certain she could hear all the loving things they were both telling her, for I had seen that phenomenon also – patients unconscious yet showing response in some manner to spoken words or songs. I came to Anne’s side and spoke softly into her ear, “Anne, dear, put your hand into the hand of God, and follow the light!” She took two more breaths and her breathing stopped. I made eye contact with the nurse who was present and she nodded. The nurse gently told the daughters their mother had died just that peacefully. Everyone hugged one another and the daughters went downstairs to tell Anne’s son who was waiting in the hospital cafeteria. I found Anne’s suitcase and gathered and packed her things for when the family would come upstairs to meet with the doctor in the Family Room.
The doctor arrived, made Anne’s death official, and then he and I, and one of the nurses and the family gathered to process and to share the event of Anne’s death. This joint coming-to-terms with a person’s demise is generally both comforting and healing for all concerned. The subdued lighting and homelike atmosphere of the Family Room was conducive to the sharing of genuine emotions. One of Anne’s daughters said that at first, when I had come into her mother’s life, just to read to her nightly, she and her sister had been jealous, and that is why she had asked me to meet her at the hospital in the daytime on an earlier occasion. And then she added, “I like to write poetry, so Mom asked me if I wouldn’t write one just for you, the volunteer who came to mean so much to her at this special time in her life. May I read it to everyone?” I nodded yes and reached for the Kleenex. “I call it Tender Flight,” she said, and she began:
But as delicate as
the petals on a flower,
So swift the trust
between us grew.
With family, love
grows as a bonding over time,
Such as you grow
accustomed to.
But with you, my
precious friend,
You brought something
special into my life.
You are the wind
whispering to me,
And a breath of
fresh air.
You are the sun
warming my heart
And radiating a
bond of warmth between us
Only we can
understand.
God has given me a
gift so rare ,--
To be one so lucky
to encounter
A person as
beautiful as you.
I give you myself,
for in you I trust.”
There was not a dry eye in that room, and I’m sure each of us was grateful the poet-daughter had provided a means for us to let the very natural tears flow and bring release and peace to the loss we were all feeling –doctor, nurse, volunteer, and most of all, family. For the next week, my evenings felt strangely empty without Anne to read to. I had to process my own loss of her in my life. In the intervening years, I have drawn strength and courage and joy from having helped to make Anne’s end-time, not a wasteland of despair, but rather a time and space for beauty and grace. Surprise, surprise!
Home Page C.A.'s
Essay About
the Kennys Related
Links Archives