HOPE: THE GIFT OF THE EASTER SEASON
Yesterday was Good Friday, today Holy Saturday, and tomorrow the Blessed Day of Easter! I am taken back in memory to a Good Friday 24 years ago when I still lived in Canada, spring was officially with us, but no clear signs of it in that north-eastern clime. No robins, no crocuses, just small dirty snow-banks, and still the need to be extra careful driving for a California-reared girl. Cliff was away visiting his girls for Easter, I was home with the two youngsters of our family, then thirteen and fourteen. And I was exhausted, having taught seven and a half months of Kindergarten, with nearly sixty children every day, divided between a morning and an afternoon class. Still two and a half more months before school would be finished June 30. (Ontario has ten months of school.)
Good Friday morning I sat in a recliner, utterly depleted of energy, and worse, of hope! I was to go to the Good Friday service and help read the Passion story later that day. Sadness overwhelmed me knowing the stark details of the Crucifixion I would be recounting during the service. Then I reached for a small community newspaper with a weekly article by one Rev. Gerald Walton Paul, a retired United Church minister who penned thoughtful, stimulating and sometimes provocative pieces for the reader to ponder. As it was Easter week, Rev. Paul postulated that even if one was not moved by the story of Jesus’ betrayal and death, and then his reappearance among his followers, one could still find a meaning for Easter just considering that Easter stands for HOPE! The article lay in my lap and I thought in the midst of my weariness and “burn-out,” what can I hope for? I have ten more weeks of school, and can hardly wait for the first day of July! I had loved every one of my then thirty-two years of teaching, and was not considering retiring for several years yet. What could I hope for?
Recently I had been reading a great deal about those who lovingly care for persons who are dying. Our local general hospital had an inspired social worker who had established a Palliative Care Service for patients with terminal conditions. I had visited my own father in an Idaho nursing home, and at 91, and after many strokes, I knew he would soon die. I had said my good-byes to him months before. I was hoping he was continuing to receive the loving care I had seen on my previous cross-continent visits. On one of those visits, I had fed my dad and then went on to feed others. The nurses had asked, “Are you a nurse?” I kept them guessing for a few days, then finally told them I had taught little children for many years, and somehow I felt very comfortable assisting elderly patients. With one accord the nurses told me, “Well, you have a gift for this kind of work. You’re a natural!” Suddenly, sitting there, it hit me what I could HOPE for! I could hope to work in the field of caring for the dying when my teaching days were over. I had something to look forward to upon retirement. Six weeks later I enrolled in a scheduled Fall class in palliative care volunteering at the hospital, and six months later I was making my rounds at the hospital, visiting patients for whom only comfort and care remained, but not the hope of cure! I hadn’t even had to wait for retirement to bring my own HOPE to fulfillment.
Actually, four years later, retirement became an easy transition for me by having gently slid into the work I would be doing after I finished my teaching career. While still teaching, I took weekend visiting assignments at the hospital, and I continued to read widely in the field of hospice and palliative care. Fourteen months after that Good Friday, I would meet Elisabeth Kubler-Ross at a conference in London, Ontario. She urged me to take a workshop with her in the fall, which indeed I did, and my course was set for a journey I am still on. But now I work out in the community, and with my husband, as a Hospice Volunteer in Southern California. Together we see Hospice and Palliative patients out in the community and offer help to their families in various ways. We also do bereavement follow-up calls for social workers who want bereaved families to know our Continuing Care service is aware that they have on-going needs in the wake of a death of a beloved family member. And in these capacities and activities, how does HOPE come into the picture?
It is a given, when Cliff and I go to be with Hospice and Palliative Care patients, that in no manner can we offer them hope for a cure for the diseases which have come their way. But HOPE can be offered, even invited, if set within the parameters of possibility. A sense of expectation for something good to happen can be set in place by asking a person the simple question, “What are you hoping for today?” The answer may come, “I would love to see my grandson,” or “It would be great if my sister would call from back east,” or “I would just like to get outside to see how the gardener is caring for my plants.” Then the visitor or volunteer can perhaps make the expected good come to pass. A call can be placed to the grandson, a letter written to the sister living at a distance, the patient taken outside to see the garden, or digital photos of the garden taken and brought inside to the person’s bedside. If the person is wrestling with pain, the volunteer immediately informs medical staff so that concern can be addressed with haste. Hospice care always means pain control!
We once met a nurse who had worked side-by-side with Elisabeth Kubler-Ross early in the nurse’s career. Then she moved on to work in an oncology unit in a New York City hospital. There she developed the habit of asking every patient each day the same question, “What are you hoping for today?” Quickly she then moved to make good possibilities happen or she more carefully gauged the state of mind of those she cared for. One particular patient always kidded around with her, giving an answer such as, “Well, today I am hoping the Yankees beat the Red Socks!” End of discussion. Then one day she met the same gentleman walking down the hall tethered to an I.V. pole, with one son on one side of him and the other son on his other side. Before the nurse could ask her usual question, the gentleman begged her, “Ask me that question you do every day?” The nurse put the question to him as usual, and with a look of relief, her sports fan patient answered, “I’m hoping my sons will let me stop this damned chemo and just die in peace.” Not the answer anybody expected, but a powerful message was thus delivered!
Thereafter, I began to ask the same question when I made my rounds in hospital. The patients I saw knew how our conversations would usually start. One Christmas Eve day, our University-aged son asked to accompany me, as there were few patients to see, and those who remained in hospital had few visitors. We entered the room of an elderly lady who had once been a world traveler with her engineer husband. She had two sons, but she said she didn’t expect to see them soon, maybe a sister-in-law might come by the next day. She engaged in lively conversation with our son about Europe, for he had recently returned from a semester in France, followed by a summer course at Oxford. In a sense, I felt he was standing-in for the two sons who were nowhere nearby. When talk of overseas ended, Miriam asked me to ask her, “What do you want for Christmas?” I posed the question, and she looked us straight in the eyes and said, “I want to die!” Two people heard her plaintive request for her life to end as quickly as possible. Maybe we weren’t the two she deeply needed to hear that, but we were there for her to say how fatigued she was with the struggle to live. Christmas day her sister-in-law did come and the following day, Miriam died. But the hope we had offered that prior day was that Miriam could speak her mind and there would be no protestations that indeed her life was mercifully coming to a close.
What is the hope that volunteers can offer families and care-givers of end-time patients? Volunteers can offer hope for a little “break” from care-giving, so that the family member can go get a haircut or massage or see a movie or have lunch with a friend. Noticing the dynamics at play in a family, the volunteer may help to make possible or more probable the needed mending of relationships “while there is time.” Listening is a great volunteer skill, and active listening to a patient’s life experience can often serve as a role model for the family’s listening, so that the life-story of one who is nearing death can become a treasured legacy, long after the funeral is over. Volunteers can offer the hope to a family, that when death occurs, it will be peaceful and not scary.
And finally, what hope can be extended to those who mourn and grieve a loved one’s death? Volunteers cannot make promises or predictions about what happens to a person who dies. But they can reassure the bereaved that the one who is lost to them in death lives on in memory, and can always be present to them in the deepest recesses of the human heart. As the blind and deaf Helen Keller put it so well: “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen nor even touched, but just felt in the heart.” And the bereaved can be promised that one may not get over grief, but with time and the love and support of others, one can get through the wrenching agony of losing a beloved. One can emerge on the other side of mourning, in due time, with a deeper appreciation of the gift of life and love we are given as human beings by our Creator.
For myself, I find hope and comfort in thinking of all forms of life and being as energy. I barely understand quantum physics, but I do know this: energy can and will always be transformed, thus H20 can appear as steam, water or ice, but it retains its essence as H20. Energy can never leave the universe. It is conserved. Your energy is safe. My energy is safe. That gives me HOPE.
Our wish for you this Easter Season is that, along with the advent of spring, you each may know HOPE IN ABUNDANCE, whatever your circumstances!
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